ArticleCommunications biology2018
Construction of arbitrarily strong amplifiers of natural selection using evolutionary graph theory.
Article in Communications biology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
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37 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mixed updating in structured populations.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- The effect of the fitness gradient on fixation probability.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Promoters of cooperation in evolutionary games.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Maintaining diversity in structured populations.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Colonization times in Moran process on graphs.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Graph-structured populations elucidate the role of deleterious mutations in long-term evolution.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Density amplifiers of cooperation for spatial games.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Fixation times on directed graphs.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Evolutionary graph theory beyond pairwise interactions: Higher-order network motifs shape times to fixation in structured populations.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Amplifiers of selection for the Moran process with both Birth-death and death-Birth updating.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Experimental evidence that network topology can accelerate the spread of beneficial mutations.Evolution letters · 2023Article
- Evolutionary dynamics of mutants that modify population structure.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Fixation probability in evolutionary dynamics on switching temporal networks.Journal of mathematical biology · 2023Article
- Self-loops in evolutionary graph theory: Friends or foes?PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Fixation dynamics on hypergraphs.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Spectral dynamics of guided edge removals and identifying transient amplifiers for death-Birth updating.Journal of mathematical biology · 2023Article
- Suppressors of fixation can increase average fitness beyond amplifiers of selection.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Evolution of cooperation with asymmetric social interactions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Because of the intrinsic randomness of the evolutionary process, a mutant with a fitness advantage has some chance to be selected but no certainty. Any experiment that searches for advantageous mutants will lose many of them due to random drift. It is therefore of great interest to find population structures that improve the odds of advantageous mutants. Such structures are called amplifiers of natural selection: they increase the probability that advantageous mutants are selected. Arbitrarily strong amplifiers guarantee the selection of advantageous mutants, even for very small fitness advantage. Despite intensive research over the past decade, arbitrarily strong amplifiers have remained rare. Here we show how to construct a large variety of them. Our amplifiers are so simple that they could be useful in biotechnology, when optimizing biological molecules, or as a diagnostic tool, when searching for faster dividing cells or viruses. They could also occur in natural population structures.
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