Berlin 2012 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 18: Posters: Statistical Physics in Biological Systems

BP 18.1: Poster

Wednesday, March 28, 2012, 17:30–19:30, Poster A

Adaptive walks and extreme value theory — •Johannes Neidhart and Joachim Krug — Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität zu Köln, Deutschland

We study biological evolution in a high-dimensional genotype space in the regime of rare mutations and strong selection. The population performs an uphill walk which terminates at local fitness maxima. Assigning fitness randomly to genotypes, we show that the mean walk length is logarithmic in the number of initially available beneficial mutations, with a prefactor determined by the tail of the fitness distribution. This result is derived analytically in a simplified setting where the mutational neighborhood is fixed during the adaptive process, and confirmed by numerical simulations.