Abstract
AbstractThe literature about mutant invasion and fixation typically assumes populations to exist in isolation from their ecosystem. Yet, populations are part of ecological communities, and enemy-victim (e.g. predator-prey or pathogen-host) interactions are particularly common. We use spatially explicit, computational pathogen-host models (with wild-type and mutant hosts) to re-visit the established theory about mutant fixation, where the pathogen equally attacks both wild-type and mutant individuals. Mutant fitness is assumed to be unrelated to infection. We find that pathogen presence substantially weakens selection, increasing the fixation probability of disadvantageous mutants and decreasing it for advantageous mutants. The magnitude of the effect rises with the infection rate. This occurs because infection induces spatial structures, where mutant and wild-type individuals are mostly spatially separated. Thus, instead of mutant and wild-type individuals competing with each other, it is mutant and wild-type “patches” that compete, resulting in smaller fitness differences and weakened selection. This implies that the deleterious mutant burden in natural populations might be higher than expected from traditional theory.
Funder
National Science Foundation
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
General Physics and Astronomy,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Chemistry,Multidisciplinary
Reference38 articles.
1. Kimura, M. On the probability of fixation of mutant genes in a population. Genetics 47, 713–719 (1962).
2. Kimura M. Population Genetics, Molecular Evolution, and Neutral Theory: Selected Papers (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
3. Patwa, Z. & Wahl, L. M. The fixation probability of beneficial mutations. J. R. Soc. Interface 5, 1279–1289 (2008).
4. Loewe, L. & Hill, W. G. The population genetics of mutations: good, bad and indifferent. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. 365, 1153–1167(2010).
5. Moran PAP. Random processes in genetics. Paper Presented At: Mathematical Proceedings Of The Cambridge Philosophical Society (1958).