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Species evolution is essentially a random process of interaction between biological populations and their environments. As a result, some physical parameters in evolution models are subject to statistical fluctuations. In this work, two important parameters in the Eigen model, the fitness and mutation rate, are treated as Gaussian distributed random variables simultaneously to examine the property of the error threshold. Numerical simulation results show that the error threshold in the fully random model appears as a crossover region instead of a phase transition point, and as the fluctuation strength increases the crossover region becomes smoother and smoother. Furthermore, it is shown that the randomization of the mutation rate plays a dominant role in changing the error threshold in the fully random model, which is consistent with the existing experimental data. The implication of the threshold change due to the randomization for antiviral strategies is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stochastic Eigen model proposed by Feng et al. (2007) (Journal of Theoretical Biology, 246, 28) showed that error threshold is no longer a phase transition point but a crossover region whose width depends on the strength of the random fluctuation in an environment. The underlying cause of this phenomenon has not yet been well examined. In this article, we adopt a single peak Gaussian distributed fitness landscape instead of a constant one to investigate and analyze the change of the error threshold and the statistical property of the quasi-species population. We find a roughly linear relation between the width of the error threshold and the fitness fluctuation strength. For a given quasi-species, the fluctuation of the relative concentration has a minimum with a normal distribution of the relative concentration at the maximum of the averaged relative concentration, it has however a largest value with a bimodal distribution of the relative concentration near the error threshold. The above results deepen our understanding of the quasispecies and error threshold and are heuristic for exploring practicable antiviral strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]