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arXiv · 1303.7006

Evolutionary stochastic dynamics of speciation and a simple genotype-phenotype map for protein binding DNA

Bhavin S. Khatri·Richard A. Goldstein
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Abstract

Speciation is of fundamental importance to understanding the huge diversity of life on Earth. In contrast to current phenomenological models, we develop a biophysically motivated approach to study speciation involving the co-evolution of protein binding DNA for two geographically isolated populations. Our results predict that, despite neutral diffusion of hybrids in trait space, smaller populations have a higher rate of speciation, due to sequence entropy poising populations more closely to incompatible regions of phenotype space. A key lesson of this work is that non-trivial contributions of sequence entropy give rise to a strong population size dependence on speciation rates.

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Bhavin S. Khatri, Richard A. Goldstein. 2013-03-27. Evolutionary stochastic dynamics of speciation and a simple genotype-phenotype map for protein binding DNA. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2015.04.027

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