Kavita Jain

Kavita Jain, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore, India

Rise and fall of asexual mutators in adapted populations

Although mutation rates are expected to be as low as possible, mutators that have a 10-100 fold higher mutation rate than the wild type have been observed in many adapting populations. Recently some experiments have reported the lowering of mutation rates in well-adapted populations. Motivated by these observations, we consider the dynamics of an asexual population of wild type and mutators with high initial fitness. Using various analytical techniques, we calculate the dependence of fixation time for wild type and mutator population on various population-genetic parameters, and relate our results to experiments.