Evolution is the hallmark of life. Descriptions of the evolution of microorganisms have
provided a wealth of information, but knowledge regarding “what happened” has precluded …

Stochasticity can play an important role in the dynamics of biologically relevant populations.
These span a broad range of scales: from intra-cellular populations of molecules to …

Epidemics and evolution of many pathogens occur on similar timescales so that their
dynamics are often entangled. Here, in a first step to study this problem theoretically, we …

Adaptive landscapes represent a mapping between genotype and fitness. Rugged adaptive
landscapes contain two or more adaptive peaks: allele combinations with higher fitness than …

How likely is it that a population escapes extinction through adaptive evolution? The answer
to this question is of great relevance in conservation biology, where we aim at species' …

Background On rugged fitness landscapes where sign epistasis is common, adaptation can
often involve either individually beneficial “uphill” mutations or more complex mutational …

There is ample empirical evidence revealing that fitness landscapes are often complex: the
fitness effect of a newly arisen mutation can depend strongly on the allelic state at other loci …

Identifying and quantifying the benefits of sex and recombination is a long-standing problem
in evolutionary theory. In particular, contradictory claims have been made about the …

Tumors initiate when a population of proliferating cells accumulates a certain number and
type of genetic and/or epigenetic alterations. The population dynamics of such sequential …

Mutational robustness quantifies the effect of random mutations on fitness. When mutational
robustness is high, most mutations do not change fitness or have only a minor effect on it …