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It doesn’t always pay to be fit: success landscapes

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Abstract

Landscapes play an important role in many areas of biology, in which biological lives are deeply entangled. Here we discuss a form of landscape in evolutionary biology which takes into account (1) initial growth rates, (2) mutation rates, (3) resource consumption by organisms, and (4) cyclic changes in the resources with time. The long-term equilibrium number of surviving organisms as a function of these four parameters forms what we call a success landscape, a landscape we would claim is qualitatively different from fitness landscapes which commonly do not include mutations or resource consumption/changes in mapping genomes to the final number of survivors. Although our analysis is purely theoretical, we believe the results have possibly strong connections to how we might treat diseases such as cancer in the future with a deeper understanding of the interplay between resource degradation, mutation, and uncontrolled cell growth.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Hans Frauenfelder, without whom this subject would have remained strictly the province of ecologists, and probably not a success. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, through the Center for the Physics of Biological Function (PHY-1734030).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, 08544, NJ, USA

    Trung V. Phan & Robert H. Austin

  2. Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, Yale University, New Haven, 06520, CT, USA

    Trung V. Phan

  3. Chongqing Key Laboratory of Soft Condensed Matter Physics and Smart Materials, College of Physics, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 400000, China

    Gao Wang & Liyu Liu

  4. Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, Princeton, 08544, NJ, USA

    Tuan K. Do

  5. Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 21218, MD, USA

    Ioannis G. Kevrekidis

  6. The Brady Urological Institute, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA

    Sarah Amend & Ken Pienta

  7. Lund Stem Cell Center and Translational Cancer Research, Department of Laboratory Medicine, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Emma Hammarlund

  8. Cancer Biology and Evolution Program and Department of Integrated Mathematical Oncology, Moffitt Cancer Center, Tampa, Florida, USA

    Joel Brown

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  1. Trung V. Phan
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  2. Gao Wang
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  3. Tuan K. Do
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  4. Ioannis G. Kevrekidis
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  5. Sarah Amend
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  6. Emma Hammarlund
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  7. Ken Pienta
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  8. Joel Brown
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  9. Liyu Liu
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  10. Robert H. Austin
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Correspondence to Trung V. Phan.

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This article belongs to the Topical Collection: The Revolutionary Impact of Landscapes in Biology

Guest Editors: Robert Austin, Shyamsunder Erramilli, Sonya Bahar

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Phan, T.V., Wang, G., Do, T.K. et al. It doesn’t always pay to be fit: success landscapes. J Biol Phys 47, 387–400 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10867-021-09589-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10867-021-09589-2

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