IPM Calendar 
Thursday 28 March 2024   Today  
Events for day: Thursday 14 September 2017    
           10:00 - 11:00     Special Seminar
The effect of randomness on the fate of mutants: Minority rules

School
BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

Abstract: In this research, we study the effect of spatial randomness on
the chances of mutant fixation in a population of individuals of a constant
size.
Such problems arise in models of cancer initiation and progression,
bacterial dynamics, and drug resistance. It turns out that spatial
heterogeneity rede fines the notion of neutrality,
allowing, e.g., a minority of cells (whose fitness values are drawn from
the same distribution as that of the wild type) to behave as if they had a
selective advantage. The effect can be very significant (increasing the
probability of mutant inva ...