Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Evolution of mutation rates in asexual populations

Ananthu James

JNCASR, Bengaluru

The living world exists in the present form because of the evolutionary processes that have been going on since the origin of life on earth. Mutations
that are random changes in the genetic material of a cell or an organism are one of the main drivers of the evolutionary processes. The early studies on mutation rates have led to the conclusion [9] that similar to many other traits, the mutation rate is also subject to evolution. My aim is to obtain a very detailed understanding of the evolution of mutation rates in an adapted asexual population, on which the theoretical works have been very few [4,8] despite some experimental investigations [6,5,11] demonstrating that a reduction in mutation rate will be favored.

In my model, I study the chances of fixation of an individual with a lower mutation rate (nonmutator) in a population evolving on a single-peaked fitness landscape in which the strength of the interactions among mutations (epistasis) can be tuned [10]. I use the Wright-Fisher process to deal with finite populations and the multitype branching process [7] to understand the chances of fixation of a nonmutator in a large population. The results I obtained [1,2,3] will be discussed in detail in the talk. Moreover, I plan to give insights into some of the open problems.

References
[1] A. James and K. Jain. Ecol. Evol., 6:755–764, 2016.
[2] A. James. J. Theor. Biol., 407:225–237, 2016.
[3] K. Jain and A. James. In preparation.
[4] M. Lynch. Genome Evol. Biol., 3:1107–18, 2011.
[5] M. J. McDonald, Y. Y. Hsieh, Y. H. Yu, S. L. Chang, and J. Y. Leu. Current Biology, 22:1235–40, 2012.
[6] L. Notley-McRobb, S. Seeto, and T. Ferenci. Genetics, 162:1055–1062, 2002.
[7] Z. Patwa and L. Wahl. J. R. Soc. Interface, 5:1279–1289, 2008.
[8] Y. Raynes and P. Sniegowski. Heredity, 113:375–380, 2014.
[9] A. H. Sturtevant. Q. Rev. Biol., 12:464–476, 1937.
[10] T. Wiehe. Genet. Res. Camb., 69:127–136, 1997.
[11] S. Wielgoss et al. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A., 110:222–227, 2013.