Speaker
Description
Differences in population growth rates between ancestors and mutants in increasingly stressful environments are often attributed to one group of individuals (ancestor or mutant) being more vulnerable to the stressful environment than the other. However, modelling the behaviour of these groups with the assumption of there being more than one phenotype in a particular group (in this case the mutants) can provide the explanation that it is the level of variation in the group's population that drives the differences in behaviour. To demonstrate this phenomena, population growth rate data of the micro-algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii in salt environments from Kraemer et al.~\cite{Kraemer} was modelled using both the conventional single-phenotype model and the alternative multi-phenotype models, where the inference of the different parameters provide competitive fits and differing explanations as to the difference in behaviour between the ancestor and mutant populations under stressful environments.
Bibliography
@article{Kraemer,
author = {S. A. Kraemer and A. D. Morgan and R. W. Ness and P. D. Keightley and N. Colegrave},
title = {Fitness effects of new mutations in \textit{Chlamydomonas reinhardtii} across two stress gradients},
journal = {Journal of Evolutionary Biology},
volume = {29},
number = {3},
pages = {583-593},
year = {2016},
doi = {10.1111/jeb.12807}}
