An individual-based model for the Lenski experiment, and the deceleration of the relative fitness

The Lenski experiment investigates the long-term evolution of bacterial populations. In this paper we present an individual-based probabilistic model that captures essential features of the experimental design, and whose mechanism does not include epistasis in the continuous-time (intraday) part of the model, but leads to an epistatic effect in the discrete-time (interday) part. We prove that under some assumptions excluding clonal interference, the rescaled relative fitness process converges in the large population limit to a power law function, similar to the one obtained by Wiser et al. (2013), there attributed to effects of clonal interference and epistasis.