I think that it could be a useful improvement if we could impose that a certain mutant of our choice avoids extinction, whatever are its rates. The case study i have in mind is when we want to simulate de-novo resistance and we want to replicate the action of a therapy for a certain amount of time. We decide to insert a resistance clone in the weak population at a certain point in the time window of therapy action, but it may happen accidentally that the weak population reaches extinction before the scheduled time of resistance acquisition. This is not an issue if we simulate just once, but if we want to simulate more evolutions under therapy, for example in some ABC inference scheme, some simulation may go wrong. So it would be useful to ask that the weak population cannot die, at least until a certain time point.
I think that it could be a useful improvement if we could impose that a certain mutant of our choice avoids extinction, whatever are its rates. The case study i have in mind is when we want to simulate de-novo resistance and we want to replicate the action of a therapy for a certain amount of time. We decide to insert a resistance clone in the weak population at a certain point in the time window of therapy action, but it may happen accidentally that the weak population reaches extinction before the scheduled time of resistance acquisition. This is not an issue if we simulate just once, but if we want to simulate more evolutions under therapy, for example in some ABC inference scheme, some simulation may go wrong. So it would be useful to ask that the weak population cannot die, at least until a certain time point.