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5,400
Plant defense multigene families: I. Divergence of Fusarium solani-induced expression in Pisum and Lathyrus
q-bio.PE
The defense response in plants challenged with pathogens is characterized by the activation of a diverse set of genes. Many of the same genes are induced in the defense responses of a wide range of plant species. How plant defense gene families evolve may therefore provide an important clue to our understanding of how ...
biology
5,401
Complexity and hierarchical game of life
q-bio.PE
Hierarchical structure is an essential part of complexity, important notion relevant for a wide range of applications ranging from biological population dynamics through robotics to social sciences. In this paper we propose a simple cellular-automata tool for study of hierarchical population dynamics.
biology
5,402
Dynamics of Fixation of Advantageous Mutations
q-bio.PE
We investigate the process of fixation of advantageous mutations in an asexual population. We assume that the effect of each beneficial mutation is exponentially distributed with mean value $\omega_{med}=1/\beta$. The model also considers that the effect of each new deleterious mutation reduces the fitness of the organ...
biology
5,403
Phase transition and selection in a four-species cyclic Lotka-Volterra model
q-bio.PE
We study a four species ecological system with cyclic dominance whose individuals are distributed on a square lattice. Randomly chosen individuals migrate to one of the neighboring sites if it is empty or invade this site if occupied by their prey. The cyclic dominance maintains the coexistence of all the four species ...
biology
5,404
The Evolution of tRNA-Leu Genes in Animal Mitochondrial Genomes
q-bio.PE
Animal mitochondrial genomes usually have two transfer RNAs for Leucine: one, with anticodon UAG, translates the four-codon family CUN, whilst the other, with anticodon UAA, translates the two-codon family UUR. These two genes must differ at the third anticodon position, but in some species the genes differ at many add...
biology
5,405
Computer simulations of history of life: speciation, emergence of complex species from simpler organisms, and extinctions
q-bio.PE
We propose a generic model of eco-systems, with a {\it hierarchical} food web structure. In our computer simulations we let the eco-system evolve continuously for so long that that we can monitor extinctions as well as speciations over geological time scales. {\it Speciation} leads not only to horizontal diversificatio...
biology
5,406
An asymptotic maximum principle for essentially linear evolution models
q-bio.PE
Recent work on mutation-selection models has revealed that, under specific assumptions on the fitness function and the mutation rates, asymptotic estimates for the leading eigenvalue of the mutation-reproduction matrix may be obtained through a low-dimensional maximum principle in the limit N to infinity (where N is th...
biology
5,407
Cellular automaton for bacterial towers
q-bio.PE
A simulation approach to the stochastic growth of bacterial towers is presented, in which a non-uniform and finite nutrient supply essentially determines the emerging structure through elementary chemotaxis. The method is based on cellular automata and we use simple, microscopic, local rules for bacterial division in n...
biology
5,408
Adaptation and enslavement in endosymbiont-host associations
q-bio.PE
The evolutionary persistence of symbiotic associations is a puzzle. Adaptation should eliminate cooperative traits if it is possible to enjoy the advantages of cooperation without reciprocating - a facet of cooperation known in game theory as the Prisoner's Dilemma. Despite this barrier, symbioses are widespread, and m...
biology
5,409
Modelling of SARS for Hong Kong
q-bio.PE
A simplified susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) epidemic model and a small-world model are applied to analyse the spread and control of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) for Hong Kong in early 2003. From data available in mid April 2003, we predict that SARS would be controlled by June and nearly 1700 persons ...
biology
5,410
Plausible models for propagation of the SARS virus
q-bio.PE
Using daily infection data for Hong Kong we explore the validity of a variety of models of disease propagation when applied to the SARS epidemic. Surrogate data methods show that simple random models are insufficient and that the standard epidemic susceptible-infected-removed model does not fully account for the underl...
biology
5,411
Quantitative patterns in the structure of model and empirical food webs
q-bio.PE
We analyze the properties of model food webs and of fifteen community food webs from a variety of environments. We first perform a theoretical analysis of the niche model of Williams and Martinez. We derive analytical expressions for the distributions of species' number of prey, number of predators, and total number of...
biology
5,412
The Waterwheel in the Waterfall
q-bio.PE
A fundamental problem in evolutionary ecology research is to explain how different species coexist in natural ecosystems. This question is directly related with species trophic competition. However, competition theory, based on the classical logistic Lotka-Volterra equations, leads to erroneous conclusions about specie...
biology
5,413
Entanglement Invariants and Phylogenetic Branching
q-bio.PE
It is possible to consider stochastic models of sequence evolution in phylogenetics in the context of a dynamical tensor description inspired from physics. Approaching the problem in this framework allows for the well developed methods of mathematical physics to be exploited in the biological arena. We present the tens...
biology
5,414
The Speed of Adaptation in Large Asexual Populations
q-bio.PE
In large asexual populations, beneficial mutations have to compete with each other for fixation. Here, I derive explicit analytic expressions for the rate of substitution and the mean beneficial effect of fixed mutations, under the assumptions that the population size N is large, that the mean effect of new beneficial ...
biology
5,415
Replication at periodically changing multiplicity of infection promotes stable coexistence of competing viral populations
q-bio.PE
RNA viruses are a widely used tool to study evolution experimentally. Many standard protocols of virus propagation and competition are done at nominally low multiplicity of infection (m.o.i.), but lead during one passage to two or more rounds of infection, of which the later ones are at high m.o.i. Here, we develop a m...
biology
5,416
Analysis of trends in human longevity by new model
q-bio.PE
Trends in human longevity are puzzling, especially when considering the limits of human longevity. Partially, the conflicting assertions are based upon demographic evidence and the interpretation of survival and mortality curves using the Gompertz model and the Weibull model; these models are sometimes considered to be...
biology
5,417
General functions for human survival and mortality
q-bio.PE
General functions for human survival and mortality may support a possibility of general mechanisms in human ageing. We discovered that the survival and mortality curves could be described very simply and accurately by the Weibull survival function with age-dependent shape parameter. The age-dependence of shape paramete...
biology
5,418
Size of the stable population in the Penna bit-string model of biological aging
q-bio.PE
In this paper the Penna model is reconsidered. With computer simulations we check how the control parameters of the model influence the size of the stable population.
biology
5,419
The Spread of Infectious Disease with Household-Structure on the Complex Networks
q-bio.PE
In this paper we study the household-structure SIS epidemic spreading on general complex networks. The household structure gives us the way to distinguish inner and the outer infection rate. Unlike household-structure models on homogenous networks, such as regular and random networks, here we consider heterogeneous net...
biology
5,420
The role of mutation rate in a simple colonization model
q-bio.PE
We study the effect of mutations in a simple model of colonization, based on Montecarlo simulations. When the population colonizes the whole available habitat, a maximum population density is reached, which depends on the mutation rate. Depending on the values of other parameters, such as selection pressure, fecundity ...
biology
5,421
Mortality decrease and mathematical limit of longevity
q-bio.PE
We wish to verify that the mortality deceleration (or decrease) is a consequence of the bending of the shape parameter at old ages. This investigation is based upon the Weon model (the Weibull model with an age-dependent shape parameter) for human survival and mortality curves. According to the Weon model, we are well ...
biology
5,422
A model of sympatric speciation through assortative mating
q-bio.PE
A microscopic model is developed, within the frame of the theory of quantitative traits, to study both numerically and analytically the combined effect of competition and assortativity on the sympatric speciation process, i.e. speciation in the absence of geographical barriers. Two components of fitness are considered:...
biology
5,423
The spread of disease with birth and death on networks
q-bio.PE
In this paper, we introduce a modified epidemic model on regular and scale-free networks respectively. We consider the birth rate $\delta$, cure rate $\gamma$, infection rate $\lambda$, $\alpha$ from the infectious disease, and death rate $\beta$ from other factors. Through mean-field analysis, we find that on regular ...
biology
5,424
Noise in ecosystems: a short review
q-bio.PE
Noise, through its interaction with the nonlinearity of the living systems, can give rise to counter-intuitive phenomena such as stochastic resonance, noise-delayed extinction, temporal oscillations, and spatial patterns. In this paper we briefly review the noise-induced effects in three different ecosystems: (i) two c...
biology
5,425
Complementarity principle on human longevity
q-bio.PE
In recent we introduced, developed and established a new concept, model, methodology and principle for studying human longevity in terms of demographic basis. We call the new model the "Weon model", which is a general model modified from the Weibull model with an age-dependent shape parameter to describe human survival...
biology
5,426
A Theoretical Framework for the Analysis of the West Nile Virus Epidemic
q-bio.PE
We present a model for the growth of West Nile virus in mosquito and bird populations based on observations of the initial epidemic in the U.S. Increase of bird mortality as a result of infection, which is a feature of the epidemic, is found to yield an effect which is observable in principle, viz., periodic variations...
biology
5,427
Complementarity between survival and mortality
q-bio.PE
Accurate demographic functions help scientists define and understand longevity. We summarize a new demographic model, the Weon model, and show the application to the demographic data for Switzerland (1876-2002). Particularly, the Weon model simply defines the maximum longevity, which is induced in nature by the mortali...
biology
5,428
Simon-Ando Decomposability and Fitness Landscapes
q-bio.PE
In this paper, we investigate fitness landscapes (under point mutation and recombination) from the standpoint of whether the induced evolutionary dynamics have a "fast-slow" time scale associated with the differences in relaxation time between local quasi-equilibria and the global equilibrium. This dynamical behavior h...
biology
5,429
Demographic trajectories for supercentenarians
q-bio.PE
A fundamental question in aging research concerns the demographic trajectories at the highest ages, especially for supercentenarians (persons aged 110 or more). We wish to demonstrate that the Weon model enables scientists to describe the demographic trajectories for supercentenarians. We evaluate the average survival ...
biology
5,430
The dauer mutation of the caenorhabditis elegans, simulated with the Penna and the Stauffer model
q-bio.PE
Two ageing models were analysed whether they can confirm that the dauer mutation of the nematode helps to preserve the species. As a result the Penna model shows that populations with dauer larvae survive bad environmental conditions, whereas populations without it die out. In the Stauffer model the advantage of the da...
biology
5,431
Stochastic evolution and multifractal classification of prokaryotes
q-bio.PE
We introduce a model for simulating mutation of prokaryote DNA sequences. Using that model we can then evaluated traditional techniques like parsimony and maximum likelihood methods for computing phylogenetic relationships. We also use the model to mimic large scale genomic changes, and use this to evaluate multifracta...
biology
5,432
Mutual information for examining correlations in DNA
q-bio.PE
This paper examines two methods for finding whether long-range correlations exist in DNA: a fractal measure and a mutual information technique. We evaluate the performance and implications of these methods in detail. In particular we explore their use comparing DNA sequences from a variety of sources. Using software fo...
biology
5,433
On the effect of fluctuating recombination rates on the decorrelation of gene histories in the human genome
q-bio.PE
We show how to incorporate fluctuations of the recombination rate along the chromosome into standard gene-genealogical models for the decorrelation of gene histories. This enables us to determine how small-scale fluctuations (Poissonian hot-spot model) and large-scale variations [Kong et al. (2002)] of the recombinatio...
biology
5,434
Introduction to new demographic model for humans
q-bio.PE
The Gompertz model since 1825 has significantly contributed to interpretation of ageing in biological and social sciences. However, in modern research findings, it is clear that the Gompertz model is not successful to describe the whole demographic trajectories. In this letter, a new demographic model is introduced esp...
biology
5,435
Ultimate limit to human longevity
q-bio.PE
Are there limits to human longevity? We suggest a new demographic model to describe human demographic trajectories. Specifically, the model mathematically defines the limits of longevity. Through the demographic analysis of trends for Sweden (between 1751 and 2002), Switzerland (between 1876 and 2002) and Japan (betwee...
biology
5,436
Comparison of tRNA and rRNA Phylogenies in Proteobacteria: Implications for the Frequency of Horizontal Gene Transfer
q-bio.PE
The current picture of bacterial evolution is based largely on studies of 16S rRNA. However, this is just one gene. It is known that horizontal gene transfer can occur between bacterial species, although the frequency and implications of this are not fully understood. If horizontal transfer were frequent, there would b...
biology
5,437
RNA-based Phylogenetic Methods: Application to Mammalian Mitochondrial RNA Sequences
q-bio.PE
The PHASE software package allows phylogenetic tree construction with a number of evolutionary models designed specifically for use with RNA sequences that have conserved secondary structure. Evolution in the paired regions of RNAs occurs via compensatory substitutions, hence changes on either side of a pair are correl...
biology
5,438
Self Trapping of a Single Bacterium in its Own Chemoattractant
q-bio.PE
Bacteria (e.g. E. Coli) are very sensitive to certain chemoattractants (e.g. asparate) which they themselves produce. This leads to chemical instabilities in a uniform population. We discuss here the different case of a single bacterium, following the general scheme of Brenner, Levitov and Budrene. We show that in one ...
biology
5,439
Effects of neighbourhood size and connectivity on spatial Continuous Prisoner's Dilemma
q-bio.PE
The Prisoner's Dilemma, a 2-person game in which the players can either cooperate or defect, is a common paradigm for studying the evolution of cooperation, when individuals exhibit variable degrees of cooperation. It is known that in the presence of spatial structure, when individuals ``play against'' their neighbours...
biology
5,440
Evolving eco-system: a network of networks
q-bio.PE
Ecology and evolution are inseparable. Motivated by some recent experiments, we have developed models of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which corresponds to an individual-based population dynamics of species, the entire network its...
biology
5,441
War of attrition with implicit time cost
q-bio.PE
In the game-theoretic model war of attrition, players are subject to an explicit cost proportional to the duration of contests. We construct a model where the time cost is not explicitly given, but instead depends implicitly on the strategies of the whole population. We identify and analyse the underlying mechanisms re...
biology
5,442
Polynomial epidemics and clustering in contact networks
q-bio.PE
It is widely known that the spread of the HIV virus was slower than exponential in several populations, even at the very beginning of the epidemic. We show that this implies a significant reduction in the effective reproductive rate of the epidemic, and describe a general mechanism, related to the clustering properties...
biology
5,443
The emergence of prime numbers as the result of evolutionary strategy
q-bio.PE
We investigate by means of a simple theoretical model the emergence of prime numbers as life cycles, as those seen for some species of cicadas. The cicadas, more precisely, the Magicicadas spend most of their lives below the ground and then emerge and die in a short period of time. The Magicicadas display an uncommon b...
biology
5,444
Community Structure and Metacommunity Dynamics of Aquatic Invertebrates: a Test of the Neutral Theory
q-bio.PE
We used a metacommunity of 49 discrete communities of aquatic invertebrates to analyze the dynamical relationship between community and metacommunity species distributions as a test of the neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography. At the community scale, observed variation in species richness and relative abunda...
biology
5,445
Altruism and Antagonistic Pleiotropy in Penna Ageing Model
q-bio.PE
The Penna ageing model is based on mutation accumulation theory. We show that it also allows for self-organization of antagonistic pleiotropy which helps at young age at the expense of old age. This can be interpreted as emergence of altruism.
biology
5,446
Maximum principle and mutation thresholds for four-letter sequence evolution
q-bio.PE
A four-state mutation-selection model for the evolution of populations of DNA-sequences is investigated with particular interest in the phenomenon of error thresholds. The mutation model considered is the Kimura 3ST mutation scheme, fitness functions, which determine the selection process, come from the permutation-inv...
biology
5,447
The criticality of the Hantavirus infected phase at Zuni
q-bio.PE
A preliminary analysis of the temporal evolution of a population of \emph{Peromyscus maniculatus} infected with Hantavirus Sin Nombre is made. Ecological and epidemiological parameters are derived from the data, and they are used as inputs for the analytical model presented in [Abramson and Kenkre, Phys. Rev. E \textbf...
biology
5,448
Flexible Foraging of Ants under Unsteadily Varying Environment
q-bio.PE
Using a simple model for the trail formation of ants, the relation between i)the schedule of feeding which represents the unsteady natural environment, ii)emerging patterns of trails connecting a nest with food resources, and iii)the foraging efficiency is studied. Simulations and a simple analysis show that the emerge...
biology
5,449
Evolvability is a Selectable Trait
q-bio.PE
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object of Darwinian selection, emphasizing the collective nature of the process. We qu...
biology
5,450
Effects of internal fluctuations on the spreading of Hantavirus
q-bio.PE
We study the spread of Hantavirus over a host population of deer mice using a population dynamics model. We show that taking into account the internal fluctuations in the mouse population due to its discrete character strongly alters the behaviour of the system. In addition to the familiar transition present in the det...
biology
5,451
Simulation and Experiment of Extinction or Adaptation
q-bio.PE
Can unicellular organisms survive a drastic temperature change, and adapt to it after many generations? In simulations of the Penna model of biological ageing, both extinction and adaptation were found for asexual and sexual reproduction as well as for parasex. These model investigations are the basis for the design of...
biology
5,452
Evolution of Spatially Inhomogeneous Eco-Systems: An Unified Model Based Approach
q-bio.PE
Recently we have extended our the "unified" model of evolutionary ecology to incorporate the {\it spatial inhomogeneities} of the eco-system and the {\it migration} of individual organisms from one patch to another within the same eco-system. In this paper an extension of our recent model is investigated so as to descr...
biology
5,453
Recurrent epidemics in small world networks
q-bio.PE
The effect of spatial correlations on the spread of infectious diseases was investigated using a stochastic SIR (Susceptible-Infective-Recovered) model on complex networks. It was found that in addition to the reduction of the effective transmission rate, through the screening of infectives, spatial correlations may ha...
biology
5,454
Competing associations in six-species predator-prey models
q-bio.PE
We study a set of six-species ecological models where each species has two predators and two preys. On a square lattice the time evolution is governed by iterated invasions between the neighboring predator-prey pairs chosen at random and by a site exchange with a probability Xs between the neutral pairs. These models i...
biology
5,455
Collective Dynamics of Active Elements: Task Allocation and Pheromone Trailing
q-bio.PE
Collective behavior of active elements inspired by mass of biological organisms is addressed. Especially, two topics are focused on among amazing behaviors performed by colony of ants. First, task allocation phenomena are treated from the viewpoint of proportion regulation of population between different states. Using ...
biology
5,456
A microscopic model of evolution of recombination
q-bio.PE
We study the evolution of recombination using a microscopic model developed within the frame of the theory of quantitative traits. Two components of fitness are considered: a static one that describes adaptation to environmental factors not related to the population itself, and a dynamic one that accounts for interacti...
biology
5,457
Cooperation driven by mutations in multi-person Prisoner's Dilemma
q-bio.PE
The n-person Prisoner's Dilemma is a widely used model for populations where individuals interact in groups. The evolutionary stability of populations has been analysed in the literature for the case where mutations in the population may be considered as isolated events. For this case, and assuming simple trigger strat...
biology
5,458
Does telomere elongation in cloned organisms lead to a longer lifespan if cancer is considered ?
q-bio.PE
... By additionally considering a two-mutation model for carcinogenesis and indefinite proliferation by the activation of telomerase, we demonstrate that the risk of dying doe to cancer can outweigh the positive effect of longer telomeres on the longevity.
biology
5,459
Stability of evolutionarily stable strategies in discrete replicator dynamics with time delay
q-bio.PE
We construct two models of discrete-time replicator dynamics with time delay. In the social-type model, players imitate opponents taking into account average payoffs of games played some units of time ago. In the biological-type model, new players are born from parents who played in the past. We consider two-player gam...
biology
5,460
Equilibrium selection in evolutionary games with random matching of players
q-bio.PE
We discuss stochastic dynamics of populations of individuals playing games. Our models possess two evolutionarily stable strategies: an efficient one, where a population is in a state with the maximal payoff (fitness) and a risk-dominant one, where players are averse to risks. We assume that individuals play with rando...
biology
5,461
Evolutionary and asymptotic stability in symmetric multi-player games
q-bio.PE
We provide a classification of symmetric three-player games with two strategies and investigate evolutionary and asymptotic stability (in the replicator dynamics) of their Nash equilibria. We discuss similarities and differences between two-player and multi-player games. In particular, we construct examples which exhib...
biology
5,462
A more comprehensive formulation of evolutionary equations
q-bio.PE
As mathematical model for the evolutionary equations of species the masterequation is choiced. Two formulations will be demonstrated to include the changes of parameters into the masterequation - that is, on the one hand, the formation of a second masterequation for the development of parameters, and, on the other hand...
biology
5,463
Self-Organized Criticality, Optimization and Biodiversity
q-bio.PE
By driven to extinction species less or poorly adapted, the Darwinian evolutionary theory is intrinsically an optimization theory. We investigate two optimization algorithms with such evolutionary characteristics: the Bak-Sneppen and the Extremal Optimization. By comparing their mean fitness in the steady state regime,...
biology
5,464
A Unified Model of Codon Reassignment in Alternative Genetic Codes
q-bio.PE
Many modified genetic codes are found in specific genomes in which one or more codons have been reassigned to a different amino acid from that in the canonical code. We present a model that unifies four possible mechanisms for reassignment, based on the observation that reassignment involves a gain and a loss. The loss...
biology
5,465
Inter-species regression analysis
q-bio.PE
When conducting inter-species regression analyses, the phylogenetic relationships between the individual species need to be taken into account. In this paper, a procedure for conducting such analyses is proposed, which only requires the use of a measure of relationship between pairs of species, rather than a complete p...
biology
5,466
An explanatory model for food-web structure and evolution
q-bio.PE
Food webs are networks describing who is eating whom in an ecological community. By now it is clear that many aspects of food-web structure are reproducible across diverse habitats, yet little is known about the driving force behind this structure. Evolutionary and population dynamical mechanisms have been considered. ...
biology
5,467
Solvable senescence model with positive mutations
q-bio.PE
We build upon our previous analytical results for the Penna model of senescence to include positive mutations. We investigate whether a small but non-zero positive mutation rate gives qualitatively different results to the traditional Penna model in which no positive mutations are considered. We find that the high-life...
biology
5,468
Analytical solution of a generalized Penna model
q-bio.PE
In 1995 T.J.Penna introduced a simple model of biological aging. A modified Penna model has been demonstrated to exhibit behaviour of real-life systems including catastrophic senescence in salmon and a mortality plateau at advanced ages. We present a general steady-state, analytic solution to the Penna model, able to d...
biology
5,469
Population Dynamics in the Penna Model
q-bio.PE
We build upon the recent steady-state Penna model solution, Phys.Rev.Lett. 89, 288103 (2002), to study the population dynamics within the Penna model. We show, that any perturbation to the population can be broken into a collection of modes each of which decay exponentially with its respective time constant. The long t...
biology
5,470
Scaling effects in the Penna ageing model
q-bio.PE
We have analysed the possibility of scaling the sexual Penna ageing model. Assuming that the number of genes expressed before the reproduction age grows linearly with the genome size and that the mutation rate per genome and generation is constant, we have found that the fraction of defective genes expressed before the...
biology
5,471
The species-area relationship and evolution
q-bio.PE
Models relating to the Species-Area curve are usually defined at the species level, and concerned only with ecological timescales. We examine an individual-based model of co-evolution on a spatial lattice based on the Tangled Nature model, and show that reproduction, mutation and dispersion by diffusion in an interacti...
biology
5,472
Forcing reversibility in the no strand-bias substitution model allows for the theoretical and practical identifiability of its 5 parameters from pairwise DNA sequence comparisons
q-bio.PE
Because of the base pairing rules in DNA, some mutations experienced by a portion of DNA during its evolution result in the same substitution, as we can only observe differences in coupled nucleotides. Then, in the absence of a bias between the two DNA strands, a model with at most 6 different parameters instead of 12 ...
biology
5,473
Tradeoff between short-term and long-term adaptation in a changing environment
q-bio.PE
We investigate the competition dynamics of two microbial or viral strains that live in an environment that switches periodically between two states. One of the strains is adapted to the long-term environment, but pays a short-term cost, while the other is adapted to the short-term environment and pays a cost in the lon...
biology
5,474
Love before Sex
q-bio.PE
Much has been debated about the benefit of sexual over asexual reproduction in terms of evolutionary fitness. Here we focus on the advantage that may be brought about by the process of mating, where the choosing of mates contributes to the increase in fitness in a constructive way. We carry out computer simulations of ...
biology
5,475
Equilibrium transitions in finite populations of players
q-bio.PE
We discuss stochastic dynamics of finite populations of individuals playing games. We review recent results concerning the dependence of the long-run behavior of such systems on the number of players and the noise level. In the case of two-player games with two symmetric Nash equilibria, when the number of players incr...
biology
5,476
Stochastic stability in three-player games
q-bio.PE
Animal behavior and evolution can often be described by game-theoretic models. Although in many situations, the number of players is very large, their strategic interactions are usually decomposed into a sum of two-player games. Only recently evolutionarily stable strategies were defined for multi-player games and thei...
biology
5,477
Thermosynthesis as energy source for the RNA World: a new model for the origin of life
q-bio.PE
The thermosynthesis concept, biological free energy gain from thermal cycling, is combined with the concept of the RNA World. The resulting overall origin of life model gives new explanations for the emergence of the genetic code and the ribosome. The first protein named pF1 obtains the energy to support the RNA world ...
biology
5,478
Stochastic models in population biology and their deterministic analogs
q-bio.PE
In this paper we introduce a class of stochastic population models based on "patch dynamics". The size of the patch may be varied, and this allows one to quantify the departures of these stochastic models from various mean field theories, which are generally valid as the patch size becomes very large. These models may ...
biology
5,479
Predator-prey cycles from resonant amplification of demographic stochasticity
q-bio.PE
In this paper we present the simplest individual level model of predator-prey dynamics and show, via direct calculation, that it exhibits cycling behavior. The deterministic analogue of our model, recovered when the number of individuals is infinitely large, is the Volterra system (with density-dependent prey reproduct...
biology
5,480
Dynamics of competing species in a model of adaptive radiations and macroevolution
q-bio.PE
We present a simple model of adaptive radiations in evolution based on species competition. Competition is found to promote species divergence and branching, and to dampen the net species production. In the model simulations, high taxonomic diversification and branching take place during the beginning of the radiation....
biology
5,481
Evolution of Variance in Offspring Number: the Effects of Population Size and Migration
q-bio.PE
It was shown by Gillespie (1974) that if two genotypes produce the same average number of offspring on but have a different variance associated within each generation, the genotype with a lower variance will have a higher effective fitness. Specifically, the effective fitness is W(effective)=w-var/N, where w is the mea...
biology
5,482
Sympatric Speciation in a Simple Food Web
q-bio.PE
Observations of the evolution of species groups in nature, such as well recognized Galapagos finches, have motivated much theoretical research aimed at understanding the processes associated with such radiations. The Penna model is one such model and has been widely used to study aging. In this paper we use the basic P...
biology
5,483
Biodiversity in model ecosystems, I: Coexistence conditions for competing species
q-bio.PE
This is the first of two papers where we discuss the limits imposed by competition to the biodiversity of species communities. In this first paper we study the coexistence of competing species at the fixed point of population dynamic equations. For many simple models, this imposes a limit on the width of the productivi...
biology
5,484
Biodiversity in model ecosystems, II: Species assembly and food web structure
q-bio.PE
This is the second of two papers dedicated to the relationship between population models of competition and biodiversity. Here we consider species assembly models where the population dynamics is kept far from fixed points through the continuous introduction of new species, and generalize to such models thecoexistence ...
biology
5,485
Simulations of a mortality plateau in the sexual Penna model for biological ageing
q-bio.PE
The Penna model is a strategy to simulate the genetic dynamics of age-structured populations, in which the individuals genomes are represented by bit-strings. It provides a simple metaphor for the evolutionary process in terms of the mutation accumulation theory. In its original version, an individual dies due to inher...
biology
5,486
Harvesting in a resource dependent age structured Leslie type population model
q-bio.PE
We analyse the effect of harvesting in a resource dependent age structured population model, deriving the conditions for the existence of a stable steady state as a function of fertility coefficients, harvesting mortality and carrying capacity of the resources. Under the effect of proportional harvest, we give a suffic...
biology
5,487
On the Statistical Law of Life
q-bio.PE
In this paper we derive a statistical law of Life. It governs the probability of death, or complementary of survival, of the living organisms. We have deduced such a law coupling the widely used Weibull statistics, developed for describing the distribution of the strength of solids, with the universal model for ontogen...
biology
5,488
Sociophysics Simulations III: Retirement Demography
q-bio.PE
This third part of the lecture series deals with the question: Who will pay for your retirement? For Western Europe the answer may be ``nobody'', but for Algeria the demography looks more promising.
biology
5,489
Mimivirus Relatives in the Sargasso Sea
q-bio.PE
The discovery and genome analysis of Acanthamoeba polyphaga Mimivirus, the largest known DNA virus, challenged much of the accepted dogma regarding viruses. Its particle size (>400 nm), genome length (1.2 million bp) and huge gene repertoire (911 protein coding genes) all contribute to blur the established boundaries b...
biology
5,490
Scaling properties of the Penna model
q-bio.PE
We investigate the scaling properties of the Penna model, which has become a popular tool for the study of population dynamics and evolutionary problems in recent years. We find that the model generates a normalised age distribution for which a simple scaling rule is proposed, that is able to reproduce qualitative feat...
biology
5,491
Sharp gene pool transition in a population affected by phenotype-based selective hunting
q-bio.PE
We use a microscopic model of population dynamics, a modified version of the well known Penna model, to study some aspects of microevolution. This research is motivated by recent reports on the effect of selective hunting on the gene pool of bighorn sheep living in the Ram Mountain region, in Canada. Our model finds a ...
biology
5,492
Density-Dependence as a Size-Independent Regulatory Mechanism
q-bio.PE
The growth function of populations is central in biomathematics. The main dogma is the existence of density dependence mechanisms, which can be modelled with distinct functional forms that depend on the size of the population. One important class of regulatory functions is the $\theta$-logistic, which generalises the l...
biology
5,493
Parametric Resonance May Explain Virologic Failure to HIV Treatment Interruptions
q-bio.PE
Pilot studies of structured treatment interruptions (STI) in HIV therapy have shown that patients can maintain low viral loads whilst benefiting from reduced treatment toxicity. However, a recent STI clinical trial reported a high degree of virologic failure. Here we present a novel hypothesis that could explain virolo...
biology
5,494
Study of Arbitrary Nonlinearities in Convective Population Dynamics with Small Diffusion
q-bio.PE
Convective counterparts of variants of the nonlinear Fisher equation which describes reaction diffusion systems in population dynamics are studied with the help of an analytic prescription and shown to lead to interesting consequences for the evolution of population densities. The initial value problem is solved explic...
biology
5,495
Environmental effects on the spread of the Neolithic
q-bio.PE
The causes and implications of the regional variations in the spread of the incipient agriculture in Europe remain poorly understood. We apply population dynamics models to study the dispersal of the Neolithic in Europe from a localized area in the Near East, solving the two-dimensional reaction-diffusion equation on a...
biology
5,496
Simulation of geographical trends in Chowdhury ecosystem model
q-bio.PE
A computer simulation based on individual births and deaths gives a biodiversity increasing from cold to warm climates, in agreement with reality. Complexity of foodwebs increases with time and at a higher rate at low latitudes, and there is a higher rate of species creation at low latitudes. Keeping many niches empty ...
biology
5,497
Evolution of polymorphism and sympatric speciation through competition in a unimodal distribution of resources
q-bio.PE
A microscopic agent dynamical model for diploid age-structured populations is used to study evolution of polymorphism and sympatric speciation. The underlying ecology is represented by a unimodal distribution of resources of some width. Competition among individuals is also described by a similar distribution, and its ...
biology
5,498
Diversity as a product of interspecial interactions
q-bio.PE
We demonstrate diversification rather than optimisation for highly interacting organisms in a well mixed biological system by means of a simple model and reference to experiment, and find the cause to be the complex network of interactions formed, allowing species less well adapted to an environment to flourish by co-i...
biology
5,499
A Predation Behavior Model Based on Game Theory
q-bio.PE
This article adopts game theory to build a model for explaining the predation behavior of animals.We assume that both the prey and the preydator have two stratigies in this game,the active one and the passive one.By calculating the outcome and the income of energy in different stratigies, we find the solution to analyz...
biology