Over the last decades, numerous studies have begun documenting the impacts of climate deregulation on species ranges. Among them, specialists, which thrive under specific environmental conditions, typically in narrow geographic ranges, are widely recognised as one of the most threatened categories. Many might rely on both their potential to adapt and on the existence of an environmental...
Bacterial plasmids and other extra-chromosomal DNA elements frequently carry genes that have important effects on the fitness of their hosts. Because plasmids often exist in the bacterial cell in multiple copies, different plasmid copies can carry distinct alleles, allowing for heterozygosity not possible for loci on haploid chromosomes. This plasmid-mediated heterozygosity may increase the...
A prime example of evolutionary rescue is the ability of cancer cells to survive treatment. Aneuploidy, the state of abnormal number of chromosomes in the cell, is hypothesized to increase fitness in the presence of anti-cancer drugs, e.g. due to incomplete pathways targeted by drugs. Aneuploidy is highly prevalent in tumours, and certain anti-cancer drugs attempt to combat cancer by...
Cancer cells evolve from a normal tissue due to the accumulation of pro-tumor mutations, called drivers, that coexist together with thousands of other somatic mutations that do not promote cancer growth, named passengers. However, the existence of drivers in normal tissues has been reported, suggesting that isolated drivers alone are not enough to trigger the development of malignant...
Evolution of drug resistance is contingent on sufficient mutational supply as well as successful establishment of the initially rare resistant cells that are subject to stochastic extinction. Importantly, the potential for resistance evolution strongly depends on the drug concentration that not only directly affects the strength of selection, but also impacts the required mutational targets,...
Rapid and widespread environmental change worldwide has raised concern about the ability of natural populations to rapidly adapt to novel conditions. Ancestral population phenotypes and population dynamics should predict successful evolutionary rescue (and adaptation) - but which specific phenotypic traits and demographic events matter? Might different founding traits and demographic events...
Maladaptive changes in the environment can provoke an adaptive response, but also induce plastic changes in organisms. Here we derive a general model of the effects of maladaptation on vitals rates—recruitment and adult mortality—in order to explore plasticity in generation time in threatened populations. We find that generation time can shift considerably during the process of evolutionary...
Uncertainty in the outcome of individual-level processes, such as death or reproduction, complicates the ability to predict population extinction; random chance may cause otherwise identical populations to experience different fates. Individual-level variability generates multiple population-level phenomena – such as demographic stochasticity, sex-ratio stochasticity, and phenotypic...
Many ecologically important organisms (including perennial grasses that shape prairies and savannahs, reef-building corals, and many invasive and pathogenic species) have life histories that include stage structure and both sexual and asexual reproduction (partial clonality) Yet how partial clonality affect a populations ability to respond by phenotypic evolution to rapid environmental change...
