Modeling microevolution in a changing environment: The evolving quasispecies and the Diluted Champion Process

Abstract

Several pathogens use evolvability as a survival strategy against acquired immunity of the host. Despite their high variability in time, some of them exhibit quite low variability within the population at any given time, a somehow paradoxical behavior often called the evolving quasispecies. In this paper we introduce a simplified model of an evolving viral population in which the effects of the acquired immunity of the host are represented by the decrease of the fitness of the corresponding viral strains, depending on the frequency of the strain in the viral population. The model exhibits evolving quasispecies behavior in a certain range of its parameters, ans suggests how punctuated evolution can be induced by a simple feedback mechanism.

15 pages, 12 figures. Figures redrawn, some additional clarifications in the text. To appear in Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment

References in corpus (3)

• Gene surfing
• Competition between recombination and epistasis can cause a transition from allele to genotype selection
• Evolution in random fitness landscapes: the infinite sites model

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Modularity Enhances the Rate of Evolution in a Rugged Fitness Landscape
• Periodic vs. intermittent adaptive cycles in quasispecies co-evolution
• Dynamical correlations in the escape strategy of Influenza A virus
• Size and structure of an epistatic space
• Mass vaccination in a roaring pandemic
• Branching with selection and mutation I: Mutant fitness of Fréchet type