Two-type branching processes with immigration, and the structured coalescents

TL;DR

This paper models the evolution of a two-type population across two islands using stochastic processes, deriving properties, limits, and dualities, and analyzing genetic variability and selection dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces the asymmetric two-island frequency process, analyzes its properties, limits, duality, and explores implications for genetic variability and selection.

Findings

Derived properties of the asymmetric two-island frequency process.

Established conditions for the process to have a moment dual.

Numerical results indicating scenarios of balancing selection and seedbank advantages.

Abstract

We consider a population constituted by two types of individuals; each of them can produce offspring in two different islands (as a particular case the islands can be interpreted as active or dormant individuals). We model the evolution of the population of each type using a two-type Feller diffusion with immigration, and we study the frequency of one of the types, in each island, when the total population size in each island is forced to be constant at a dense set of times. This leads to the solution of a SDE which we call the asymmetric two-island frequency process. We derive properties of this process and obtain a large population limit when the total size of each island tends to infinity. Additionally, we compute the fluctuations of the process around its deterministic limit. We establish conditions under which the asymmetric two-island frequency process has a moment dual. The dual is a continuous-time two-dimensional Markov chain that can be interpreted in terms of mutation, branching, pairwise branching, coalescence, and a novel mixed selection-migration term. Also, we conduct a stability analysis of the limiting deterministic dynamical system and present some numerical results to study fixation and a new form of balancing selection. When restricting to the seedbank model, we observe that some combinations of the parameters lead to balancing selection. Besides finding yet another way in which genetic reservoirs increase the genetic variability, we find that if a population that sustains a seedbank competes with one that does not, the seed producers will have a selective advantage if they reproduce faster, but will not have a selective disadvantage if they reproduce slower: their worst case scenario is balancing selection.