arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Sylvain Gandon.
With the unprecedented global vaccination campaign against SARS-CoV-2 attention has now turned to the potential impact of this large-scale intervention on the evolution of the virus. In this perspective we summarize what is currently known about evolution in the context of vaccination from research on other pathogen species, with an eye towards the future evolution of SARS-CoV-2.
In this note, we characterize the solution of a system of elliptic integro-differential equations describing a phe-notypically structured population subject to mutation, selection and migration. Generalizing an approach based on Hamilton-Jacobi equations, we identify the dominant terms of the solution when the mutation term is small (but nonzero). This method was initially used, for different problems from evolutionary biology, to identify the asymptotic solutions, while the mutations vanish, as a sum of Dirac masses. A key point is a uniqueness property related to the weak KAM theory. This method allows to go further than the Gaussian approximation commonly used by biologists and is an attempt to fill the gap between the theories of adaptive dynamics and quantitative genetics.
The theory of life history evolution provides a powerful framework to understand the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in both epidemic and endemic situations. This framework, however, relies on the assumption that pathogen populations are very large and that one can neglect the effects of demographic stochasticity. Here we expand the theory of life history evolution to account for the effects of finite population size on the evolution of pathogen virulence. We show that demographic stochasticity introduces additional evolutionary forces that can qualitatively affect the dynamics and the evolutionary outcome. We discuss the importance of the shape of pathogen fitness landscape and host heterogeneity on the balance between mutation, selection and genetic drift. In particular, we discuss scenarios where finite population size can dramatically affect classical predictions of deterministic models. This analysis reconciles Adaptive Dynamics with population genetics in finite populations and thus provides a new theoretical toolbox to study life-history evolution in realistic ecological scenarios.