Related papers: Genome landscapes and bacteriophage codon usage
The quantitative characterization of mutational landscapes is a task of outstanding importance in evolutionary and medical biology: It is, e.g., of central importance for our understanding of the phenotypic effect of mutations related to…
Bacterial cells are sensitive to a range of external signals used to learn the environment. These incoming external signals are then processed using a Gene Regulatory Network (GRN), exhibiting similarities to modern computing algorithms. An…
Generating protein sequences conditioned on protein structures is an impactful technique for protein engineering. When synthesizing engineered proteins, they are commonly translated into DNA and expressed in an organism such as yeast. One…
Recent genome-wide measurements of binding preferences of ~200 transcription regulators in the vicinity of transcription start sites in yeast, have provided a unique insight into the cis- regulatory code of a eukaryotic genome (Venters et…
The phenotypic consequences of individual mutations are modulated by the wild type genetic background in which they occur.Although such background dependence is widely observed, we do not know whether general patterns across species and…
It has been proposed that the degeneracy of the genetic code,i.e., the phenomenon that different codons (base triplets) of DNA are transcribed into the same amino acid, may be interpreted as the result of a symmetry breaking process. In the…
We show that textual analysis of microbial genomes reveal telling footprints of the early evolution of the genomes. The frequencies of word occurrence of random DNA sequences considered as texts in their four nucleotides are expected to…
The Saccharomyces cerevisiae protein-protein interaction map, as well as many natural and man-made networks, shares the scale-free topology. The preferential attachment model was suggested as a generic network evolution model that yields…
Several technological applications require the translation of a protein into a nucleic acid that codes for it (``backtranslation''). The degeneracy of the genetic code makes this translation ambiguous; moreover, not every translation is…
It is widely accepted that population genetics theory is the cornerstone of evolutionary analyses. Empirical tests of the theory, however, are challenging because of the complex relationships between space, dispersal, and evolution.…
The genome of bacterial species is much more flexible than that of eukaryotes. Moreover, the distributed genome hypothesis for bacteria states that the total number of genes present in a bacterial population is greater than the genome of…
Prokaryotic gene prediction plays an important role in understanding the biology of organisms and their function with applications in medicine and biotechnology. Although the current gene finders are highly sensitive in finding long genes,…
Among several quantitative invariants found in evolutionary genomics, one of the most striking is the scaling of the overall abundance of proteins, or protein domains, sharing a specific functional annotation across genomes of given size.…
The genetic code maps the sixty-four nucleotide triplets (codons) to twenty amino-acids. While the biochemical details of this code were unraveled long ago, its origin is still obscure. We review information-theoretic approaches to the…
Horizontal gene transfer is an important factor in bacterial evolution that can act across species boundaries. Yet, we know little about rate and genomic targets of cross-lineage gene transfer, and about its effects on the recipient…
The nucleotide composition of human genes with a special emphasis on transcription-related strand asymmetries is analyzed. Such asymmetries may be associated with different mutational rates in two principal factors. The first one is…
Biological evolution can be conceptualized as a search process in the space of gene sequences guided by the fitness landscape, a mapping that assigns a measure of reproductive value to each genotype. Here we discuss probabilistic models of…
Why is the genetic code the way it is? The most successful theory states that the codon assignments minimise the effects of errors arising in primordial living systems. Here a transversion is reported that leaves invariant degeneracy in the…
We identify a set of 575 human genes that are expressed in all conditions tested in a publicly available database of microarray results. Based on this common occurrence, the set is expected to be rich in "housekeeping" genes, showing…
Biological cells replicate their genomes in a well-planned manner. The DNA replication program of an organism determines the timing at which different genomic regions are replicated, with fundamental consequences for cell homeostasis and…