Effect of mutators on adaptability in time-varying fitness landscapes

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2008 Apr;77(4 Pt 1):042901. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.77.042901. Epub 2008 Apr 10.

Abstract

This Brief Report studies the quasispecies dynamics of a population capable of genetic repair evolving on a time-dependent fitness landscape. We develop a model that considers an asexual population of single-stranded, conservatively replicating genomes, whose only source of genetic variation is due to copying errors during replication. We consider a time-dependent, single-fitness-peak landscape where the master sequence changes by a single point mutation at every time tau. We are able to analytically solve for the evolutionary dynamics of the population in the point-mutation limit. In particular, our model provides an analytical expression for the fraction of mutators in the dynamic fitness landscape that agrees well with results from stochastic simulations.