Surfing on the seascape: Adaptation in a changing environment.

ABSTRACT: The environment changes constantly at various time scales and, in order to survive, species need to keep adapting. Whether these species succeed in avoiding extinction is a major evolutionary question. Using a multilocus evolutionary model of a mutation-limited population adapting under strong selection, we investigate the effects of the frequency of environmental fluctuations on adaptation. Our results rely on an "adaptive-walk" approximation and use mathematical methods from evolutionary computation theory to investigate the interplay between fluctuation frequency, the similarity of environments, and the number of loci contributing to adaptation. First, we assume a linear additive fitness function, but later generalize our results to include several types of epistasis. We show that frequ

SUBMITTER: Trubenova B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6771940 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature