Copyright © 2010 Thierry E. Huillet. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We revisit some problems arising in the context of multiallelic discrete-time evolutionary dynamics driven by fitness. We consider both the deterministic and the stochastic setups and for the latter both the Wright-Fisher and the Moran approaches. In the deterministic formulation, we construct a Markov process whose Master equation identifies with the nonlinear deterministic evolutionary equation. Then, we draw the attention on a class of fitness matrices that plays some role in the important matter of polymorphism: the class of strictly ultrametric fitness matrices. In the random cases, we focus on fixation probabilities, on various conditionings on nonfixation, and on (quasi)stationary distributions.