The Effect of Mutators on Adaptability in Time-Varying Fitness Landscapes

TL;DR

This paper models how mutator populations adapt on changing fitness landscapes, providing analytical solutions for their dynamics and the fraction of mutators, which align with simulation results.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical model for mutator dynamics in time-varying fitness landscapes, focusing on a single-peak landscape with periodic changes.

Findings

Analytical expression for mutator fraction matches simulations.

Model captures population adaptation on dynamic landscapes.

Provides insights into genetic repair effects on adaptability.

Abstract

This Letter studies the quasispecies dynamics of a population capable of genetic repair evolving on a time-dependent fitness landscape. We develop a model that considers an asexual population of single-stranded, conservatively replicating genomes, whose only source of genetic variation is due to copying errors during replication. We consider a time-dependent, single-fitness-peak landscape where the master sequence changes by a single point mutation every time $ \tau $. We are able to analytically solve for the evolutionary dynamics of the population in the point-mutation limit. In particular, our model provides an analytical expression for the fraction of mutators in the dynamic fitness landscape that agrees well with results from stochastic simulations.