Related papers: Congruent evolution of genetic and environmental r…
Robustness to genetic or environmental disturbances is often considered as a key property of living systems. Yet, in spite of being discussed since the 1950s, how robustness emerges from the complexity of genetic architectures and how it…
The characterization of plasticity, robustness, and evolvability, an important issue in biology, is studied in terms of phenotypic fluctuations. By numerically evolving gene regulatory networks, the proportionality between the phenotypic…
Phenotype of biological systems needs to be robust against mutation in order to sustain themselves between generations. On the other hand, phenotype of an individual also needs to be robust against fluctuations of both internal and external…
Genetic robustness, the preservation of evolved phenotypes against genotypic mutations, is one of the central concepts in evolution. In recent years a large body of work has focused on the origins, mechanisms, and consequences of robustness…
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…
The ability to absorb mutations while retaining structure and function, or mutational robustness, is a remarkable property of natural proteins. In this Letter, we use a computational model of organismic evolution [Zeldovich et al, PLOS Comp…
A full accounting of biological robustness remains elusive; both in terms of the mechanisms by which robustness is achieved and the forces that have caused robustness to grow over evolutionary time. Although its importance to topics such as…
Conventional population genetics considers the evolution of a limited number of genotypes corresponding to phenotypes with different fitness. As model phenotypes, in particular RNA secondary structure, have become computationally tractable,…
The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, we propose a new computational method to investigate the particularities of evolution. Second, we apply this method to a model of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) and explore the evolution of…
Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are complex systems in which many genes regulate mutually to adapt the cell state to environmental conditions. In addition to function, the GRNs possess several kinds of robustness. This robustness means that…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
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…
The mutation-selection mechanism of Darwinian evolution gives rise not only to adaptation to environmental conditions but also to the enhancement of robustness against mutations. When two or more phenotypes have the same fitness value, the…
Search for possible relationships between phylogeny and ontogeny is one of the most important issues in the field of evolutionary developmental biology. By representing developmental dynamics of spatially located cells with gene expression…
Stronger selection implies faster evolution---that is, the greater the force, the faster the change. This apparently self-evident proposition, however, is derived under the assumption that genetic variation within a population is primarily…
Backpropagation-optimized artificial neural networks, while precise, lack robustness, leading to unforeseen behaviors that affect their safety. Biological neural systems do solve some of these issues already. Unlike artificial models,…
Evolution on neutral networks of genotypes has been found in models to concentrate on genotypes with high mutational robustness, to a degree determined by the topology of the network. Here analysis is generalized beyond neutral networks to…
Recent studies of genotype-phenotype (GP) maps have reported universally enhanced phenotypic robustness to genotype mutations, a feature essential to evolution. Virtually all of these studies make a simplifying assumption that each genotype…
We study a genetic regulatory network model developed to demonstrate that genetic robustness can evolve through stabilizing selection for optimal phenotypes. We report preliminary results on whether such selection could result in a…
The genetic code underlying protein synthesis is a canonical example of a degenerate biological system. Degeneracies in physical and biological systems can be lifted by external perturbations thus allowing degenerate systems to exhibit a…