Related papers: Neutral genetic drift can aid functional protein e…
Biological genotypes do not code directly for phenotypes; developmental physiology is the control layer that separates genomes from capacities ascertained by selection. A key aspect is competency, as cells are not a passive material but…
Gene expression in cells is stochastic, yet differentiation is robust. We propose a mechanism in which frustrated genes with weakly stable intermediate expression undergo noise-driven switching between basins of attraction, followed by…
Evolution is simultaneously driven by a number of processes such as mutation, competition and random sampling. Understanding which of these processes is dominating the collective evolutionary dynamics in dependence on system properties is a…
When software evolves, opportunities for introducing faults appear. Therefore, it is important to test the evolved program behaviors during each evolution cycle. We conduct an exploratory study to investigate the properties of…
Information theoretic analysis of large evolved programs produced by running genetic programming for up to a million generations has shown even functions as smooth and well behaved as floating point addition and multiplication loose entropy…
We present a self-consistent field approximation to the problem of the genetic switch composed of two mutually repressing/activating genes. The protein and DNA state dynamics are treated stochastically and on equal footing. In this approach…
In the protein sequence space, natural proteins form clusters of families which are characterized by their unique native folds whereas the great majority of random polypeptides are neither clustered nor foldable to unique structures. Since…
The function of proteins arises from cooperative interactions and rearrangements of their amino acids, which exhibit large-scale dynamical modes. Long-range correlations have also been revealed in protein sequences, and this has motivated…
Recent work has shown that expression level is the main predictor of a gene’s evolutionary rate, and that more highly expressed genes evolve slower. A possible explanation for this observation is selection for proteins which fold…
A central question is how the conformational changes of proteins affect their function and the inhibition of this function by drug molecules. Many enzymes change from an open to a closed conformation upon binding of substrate or inhibitor…
A growing amount of evidence points to the fact that many enzymes exhibit fluctuations in their catalytic activity, which are associated with conformational changes on a broad range of timescales. The experimental study of this phenomenon,…
The parallel mutation-selection evolutionary dynamics, in which mutation and replication are independent events, is solved exactly in the case that the Malthusian fitnesses associated to the genomes are described by the Random Energy Model…
Protein function prediction is currently achieved by encoding its sequence or structure, where the sequence-to-function transcendence and high-quality structural data scarcity lead to obvious performance bottlenecks. Protein domains are…
Between-species coevolution, and in particular antagonistic host-parasite coevolution, is a major process shaping within-species diversity. In this paper we investigate the role of various stochastic processes affecting the outcome of the…
Mutational neighbourhoods in genotype-phenotype (GP) maps are widely believed to be more likely to share characteristics than expected from random chance. Such genetic correlations should, as John Maynard Smith famously pointed out,…
The role of post-translational modification of histones in eukaryotic gene regulation is well recognized. Epigenetic silencing of genes via heritable chromatin modifications plays a major role in cell fate specification in higher organisms.…
We investigate the evolutionary dynamics of a finite population of RNA sequences adapting to a neutral fitness landscape. Despite the lack of differential fitness between viable sequences, we observe typical properties of adaptive…
The regulation of cellular function is often controlled at the level of gene transcription. Such genetic regulation usually consists of interacting networks, whereby gene products from a single network can act to control their own…
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 phage $\lambda$ infection of an \textit{E. coli} cell has become a paradigm for understanding the molecular processes involved in gene expression and cell signaling. This system provides an example of a genetic switch, as cells with…