Gaussian closure scheme for evolving genomes: application to double-peak fitness landscape with short-range epistasis

by Mr Eugenio Mauri (ENS-Paris)

Thursday 17 Sept 2020, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Stockholm

Describing the evolution of a population of genomes evolving in a complex fitness landscape is generally very hard. To make this problem treatable, we introduce an approximate Gaussian closure scheme to characterize analytically the statistics of a genomic population, applicable to  generic values of the rates of mutation or recombination and fitness functions.  The Gaussian approximation is illustrated on a short-range fitness landscape with two far away and competing maxima. It unveils the existence of a phase transition from a broad to a polarized distribution of genomes as the strength of epistatic couplings is increased, characterized by slow coarsening dynamics of competing allele domains.

The talk will be given on zoom.