Related papers: Congruent evolution of genetic and environmental r…
It is well known that, under suitable conditions, microRNAs are able to fine tune the relative concentration of their targets to any desired value. We show that this function is particularly effective when one of the targets is a…
The contribution to an organism's phenotype from one genetic locus may depend upon the status of other loci. Such epistatic interactions among loci are now recognized as fundamental to shaping the process of adaptation in evolving…
Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
We study the relative importance of "top-speed" (long-term growth rate) and "acceleration" (how quickly the long-term growth rate can be reached) in the evolutionary race to increase population size. We observe that fitness alone does not…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…
We consider evolution of a large population, where fitness of each organism is defined by many phenotypical traits. These traits result from expression of many genes. We propose a new model of gene regulation, where gene expression is…
Formation of base pairs between the nucleotides of an RNA sequence gives rise to a complex and often highly branched RNA structure. While numerous studies have demonstrated the functional importance of the high degree of RNA branching --…
In multicellular organisms, cells differentiate into several distinct types during early development. Determination of each cellular state, along with the ratio of each cell type, as well as the developmental course during cell…
We construct a model of speciation from evolution in an ecosystem consisting of a limited amount of energy recources. The species posses genetic information, which is inherited according to the rules of the Penna model of genetic evolution.…
Eukaryote genomes contain excessively introns, inter-genic and other non-genic sequences that appear to have no vital functional role or phenotype manifestation. Their existence, a long-standing puzzle, is viewed from the principle of…
A convolutional neural network strongly robust to adversarial perturbations at reasonable computational and performance cost has not yet been demonstrated. The primate visual ventral stream seems to be robust to small perturbations in…
A tumor can be thought of as an ecosystem, which critically means that we cannot just consider it as a collection of mutated cells but more as a complex system of many interacting cellular and microenvironmental elements. At its simplest, a…
Longevity of a taxonomic group is an important issue in understanding the dynamics of evolution. In this respect a key observation is that genera, families or orders can each be assigned a characteristic average lifetime [Van Valen, L.,…
Biological systems exhibit two structural features on many levels of organization: sparseness, in which only a small fraction of possible interactions between components actually occur; and modularity - the near decomposability of the…
Phenotypic plasticity and its evolution may help evolutionary rescue in a novel and stressful environment, especially if environmental novelty reveals cryptic genetic variation that enables the evolution of increased plasticity. However,…
Configurational arrangement of network architecture and interaction character of individuals are two most influential factors on the mechanisms underlying the evolutionary outcome of cooperation, which is explained by the well-established…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
MicroRNAs are endogenous non-coding RNAs which negatively regulate the expression of protein-coding genes in plants and animals. They are known to play an important role in several biological processes and, together with transcription…
Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…