Tipping points and early warning signals in the genomic composition of populations induced by environmental changes.

ABSTRACT: We live in an ever changing biosphere that faces continuous and often stressing environmental challenges. From this perspective, much effort is currently devoted to understanding how natural populations succeed or fail in adapting to evolving conditions. In a different context, many complex dynamical systems experience critical transitions where their dynamical behaviour or internal structure changes suddenly. Here we connect both approaches and show that in rough and correlated fitness landscapes, population dynamics shows flickering under small stochastic environmental changes, alerting of the existence of tipping points. Our analytical and numerical results demonstrate that transitions at the genomic level preceded by early-warning signals are a generic phenomenon in constant and slowly

SUBMITTER: Aguirre J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4428070 | biostudies-literature | 2015 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature