Related papers: Evolution favors protein mutational robustness in …
Classical population genetics a priori assigns fitness to alleles without considering molecular or functional properties of proteins that these alleles encode. Here we study population dynamics in a model where fitness can be inferred from…
Neutral landscapes and mutational robustness are believed to be important enablers of evolvability in biology. We apply these concepts to software, defining mutational robustness to be the fraction of random mutations that leave a program's…
We consider the effect of network structure on the evolution of a population. Models of this kind typically consider a population of fixed size and distribution. Here we consider eco-evolutionary dynamics where population size and…
A fundamental question for evolutionary biology is why rates of evolution vary dramatically between proteins. Perhaps surprisingly, it is controversial how much a protein's functional importance affects its rate of evolution. In most…
We introduce and analyze a general model of a population evolving over a network of selectively neutral genotypes. We show that the population's limit distribution on the neutral network is solely determined by the network topology and…
We study the dynamics of an age-structured population in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of its parent. When advantageous mutation is favored, the average fitness of the population grows…
How typical elements that shape organisms, such as protein secondary structures, have evolved, or how evolutionarily susceptible/resistant they are to environmental changes, are significant issues in evolutionary biology, structural…
We study the dynamics of a population subject to selective pressures, evolving either on RNA neutral networks or in toy fitness landscapes. We discuss the spread and the neutrality of the population in the steady state. Different limits…
Weak purifying selection, acting on many linked mutations, may play a major role in shaping patterns of molecular evolution in natural populations. Yet efforts to infer these effects from DNA sequence data are limited by our incomplete…
The n-person Prisoner's Dilemma is a widely used model for populations where individuals interact in groups. The evolutionary stability of populations has been analysed in the literature for the case where mutations in the population may be…
Variation and selection are the core principles of Darwinian evolution, yet quantitatively relating the diversity of a population to its capacity to respond to selection is challenging. Here, we examine this problem at a molecular level in…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…
We suggest to simulate evolution of complex organisms constrained by the sole requirement of robustness in their expression patterns. This scenario is illustrated by evolving discrete logical networks with epigenetic properties. Evidence…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
Non-genetic perturbations, such as environmental change or developmental noise, can induce novel phenotypes. If an induced phenotype confers a fitness advantage, selection may promote its genetic stabilization. Non-genetic perturbations can…
Fitness effects of mutations fall on a continuum ranging from lethal to deleterious to beneficial. The distribution of fitness effects (DFE) among random mutations is an essential component of every evolutionary model and a mathematical…
The standard genetic code is known to be robust to translation errors and point mutations. We studied how small modifications of the standard code affect its robustness. The robustness was assessed in terms of a proper stability function,…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…
The protein folding problem has attracted an increasing attention from physicists. The problem has a flavor of statistical mechanics, but possesses the most common feature of most biological problems -- the profound effects of evolution. I…
The adaptive evolution of large asexual populations is generally characterized by competition between clones carrying different beneficial mutations. This interference phenomenon slows down the adaptation speed and makes the theoretical…