The Effect of Mutators on Adaptability in Time-Varying Fitness Landscapes

Abstract

This Letter studies the quasispecies dynamics of a population capable of genetic repair evolving on a time-dependent fitness landscape. We develop a model that considers an asexual population of single-stranded, conservatively replicating genomes, whose only source of genetic variation is due to copying errors during replication. We consider a time-dependent, single-fitness-peak landscape where the master sequence changes by a single point mutation every time $\tau$. We are able to analytically solve for the evolutionary dynamics of the population in the point-mutation limit. In particular, our model provides an analytical expression for the fraction of mutators in the dynamic fitness landscape that agrees well with results from stochastic simulations.

arXiv comment4 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Error Thresholds on Dynamic Fittness-Landscapes
• Mutator Dynamics on a Smooth Evolutionary Landscape
• Equilibrium Distribution of Mutators in the Single Fitness Peak Model
• The Error and Repair Catastrophes: A Two-Dimensional Phase Diagram in the Quasispecies Model