Figure 6.

An evolutionary trade‐off with niche size in mice. For scenarios where mutations affect division rate, tumorigenesis is minimized at an intermediate population size (a), at the expense of fixing deleterious mutations and decreasing tissue renewal (c). For scenarios where mutations affect differentiation rate, tumorigenesis is minimized for large population sizes (b), and the effect of mutation accumulation on the epithelium is independent of niche size (d). The black vertical dotted line is placed at 6, the median niche size measured in the mouse