Related papers: The look-ahead effect of phenotypic mutations
The outcomes of evolution are determined by which mutations occur and fix. In rapidly adapting microbial populations, this process is particularly hard to predict because lineages with different beneficial mutations often spread…
How does the interplay between selection, mutation and horizontal gene transfer modify the phenotypic distribution of a bacterial or cell population? While horizontal gene transfer, which corresponds to the exchange of genetic material…
To learn about the past from a sample of genomic sequences, one needs to understand how evolutionary processes shape genetic diversity. Most population genetic inference is based on frameworks assuming adaptive evolution is rare. But if…
We are interested in modelling Darwinian evolution, resulting from the interplay of phenotypic variation and natural selection through ecological interactions. Our models are rooted in the microscopic, stochastic description of a population…
Horizontal transfer (HT) of heritable information or `traits' (carried by genetic elements, endosymbionts, or culture) is widespread among living organisms. Yet current ecological and evolutionary theory addressing HT is limited. We present…
Mutations are typically classified by their effects on the nucleotide sequence and by their size. Here, we argue that if our main aim is to understand the effect of mutations on evolutionary outcomes (such as adaptation or speciation), we…
Genotype-to-phenotype mappings translate genotypic variations such as mutations into phenotypic changes. Neutrality is the observation that some mutations do not lead to phenotypic changes. Studying the search trajectories in genotypic and…
Population genomic studies have shown that genetic draft and background selection can profoundly affect the genome-wide patterns of molecular variation. We performed forward simulations under realistic gene-structure and selection scenarios…
Adaptation is a central topic in theoretical biology, of practical importance for analyzing drug resistance mutations. Several authors have used arguments based on extreme value theory in their work on adaptation. There are complications…
We consider the Moran model of population genetics with two types, mutation, and selection, and investigate the line of descent of a randomly-sampled individual from a contemporary population. We trace this ancestral line back into the…
BACKGROUND: An important question is whether evolution favors properties such as mutational robustness or evolvability that do not directly benefit any individual, but can influence the course of future evolution. Functionally similar…
Crossover and mutation are the two main operators that lead to new solutions in evolutionary approaches. In this article, a new method of performing the crossover phase is presented. The problem of choice is evolutionary decision tree…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
Divergence between populations for a given trait can be driven by natural or sexual selection, interacting with migration behaviour. Mating preference for different phenotypes can lead to the emergence and persistence of differentiated…
Evolutionary analyses of large populations commonly incorporate stochasticity through temporal variation in selection while treating genetic transmission as fixed. Much less attention has been given to stochasticity in transmission itself.…
Pervasive natural selection can strongly influence observed patterns of genetic variation, but these effects remain poorly understood when multiple selected variants segregate in nearby regions of the genome. Classical population genetics…
Using Monte Carlo model of biological evolution we have discovered that populations can switch between two different strategies of their genomes' evolution; Darwinian purifying selection and complementing the haplotypes. The first one is…
When an advantageous mutation occurs in a population, the favorable allele may spread to the entire population in a short time, an event known as a selective sweep. As a result, when we sample $n$ individuals from a population and trace…
The extent of parallel evolution at the genotypic level is quantitatively linked to the distribution of beneficial fitness effects (DBFE) of mutations. The standard view, based on light-tailed distributions (i.e. distributions with finite…
Positive selection distorts the structure of genealogies and hence alters patterns of genetic variation within a population. Most analyses of these distortions focus on the signatures of hitchhiking due to hard or soft selective sweeps at a…