Physics Commons^™

Roughening Interfaces In Spatial Population Dynamics, Clarisa E. Castillo

Doctoral Dissertations

The spatial structure and geometry of biological systems can have a strong effect on that system’s evolutionary dynamics. In particular, spatially structured populations may invade one another, giving rise to invasion fronts that may exhibit qualitatively different evolutionary dynamics in different dimensions or geometric configurations. For examples of invasion fronts arising in nature, one might think of a thin layer of bacteria cells growing on a Petri dish, an animal species expanding into new territory, or a cancerous tumor growing into and competing with the surrounding healthy tissue. Perhaps the most well-studied class of invasion fronts in population genetics is …