Geometry-Induced Competitive Release in a Meta-Population Model of Range Expansions in Disordered Environments

TL;DR

This study demonstrates how environmental geometry, specifically the arrangement of resource-rich hotspots, can significantly promote the survival of deleterious mutants during population range expansions, with predictions validated by a geometrical optics model.

Contribution

The paper introduces a geometrical optics framework to predict mutant survival influenced by environmental hotspots in disordered habitats, revealing a novel mechanism of competitive release.

Findings

Hotspot arrangements lead to increased mutant survival.

The geometrical optics model accurately predicts mutant dynamics without fitting parameters.

Environmental noise effects are maximized near a percolation transition.

Abstract

Rare evolutionary events, such as the rise to prominence of deleterious mutations, can have drastic impacts on the evolution of growing populations. Heterogeneous environments may reduce the influence of selection on evolutionary outcomes through various mechanisms, including pinning of genetic lineages and of the population fronts. These effects play significant roles in enabling competitive release of otherwise trapped mutations. In this work we show that environments containing random arrangements of "hotspot" patches, where locally abundant resources enhance growth rates equally for all sub-populations, give rise to massively enriched deleterious mutant clones. We derive a geometrical optics description of mutant bubbles, which result from interactions with hotspots, that successfully predicts the observed increase in mutant survival. This prediction requires no fitting parameters and holds well in scenarios of rare mutations and of adaptation from standing variation. In addition, we find that the influence of environmental noise in shaping the fate of rare mutations is maximal near a percolation transition of overlapping discs, beyond which mutant survival decreases.