The Effect of Mutators on Adaptability in Time-Varying Fitness Landscapes

This Letter studies the quasispecies dynamics of a population capable of genetic repair evolving on a time-dependent fitness landscape. We develop a model that considers an asexual population of single-stranded, conservatively replicating genomes, whose only source of genetic variation is due to copying errors during replication. We consider a time-dependent, single-fitness-peak landscape where the master sequence changes by a single point mutation every time $ \tau $. We are able to analytically solve for the evolutionary dynamics of the population in the point-mutation limit. In particular, our model provides an analytical expression for the fraction of mutators in the dynamic fitness landscape that agrees well with results from stochastic simulations.