Related papers: Lethal Mutagenesis in Viruses and Bacteria
Recurrent mutations are a common phenomenon in population genetics. They may be at the origin of the fixation of a new genotype, if they give a phenotypic advantage to the carriers of the new mutation. In this paper, we are interested in…
Neutral landscapes and mutational robustness are believed to be important enablers of evolvability in biology. We apply these concepts to software, defining mutational robustness to be the fraction of random mutations that leave a program's…
This Letter studies the quasispecies dynamics of a population capable of genetic repair evolving on a time-dependent fitness landscape. We develop a model that considers an asexual population of single-stranded, conservatively replicating…
Gene duplications are one of major primary driving forces for evolutionary novelty. We took population genetics models of genes duplicate to study how evolutionary forces acting during the fixation of mutant allele at duplicate loci. We…
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…
Heterogeneity in biological molecules, resulting in molecule-to-molecule variations in their dynamics and function, is an emerging theme. To elucidate the consequences of heterogeneous behavior at the single molecule level, we propose an…
In evolutionary dynamics, a key measure of a mutant trait's success is the probability that it takes over the population given some initial mutant-appearance distribution. This "fixation probability" is difficult to compute in general, as…
We study the stationary state of a population evolving under the action of random genetic drift, selection and recombination in which both deleterious and reverse beneficial mutations can occur. We find that the equilibrium fraction of…
We study the fixation probability of a mutant type when introduced into a resident population. As opposed to the usual assumption of constant pop- ulation size, we allow for stochastically varying population sizes. This is implemented by a…
Mutations create the genetic diversity on which selective pressures can act, yet also create structural instability in proteins. How, then, is it possible for organisms to ameliorate mutation-induced perturbations of protein stability while…
Epistasis refers to the phenomenon in which phenotypic consequences caused by mutation of one gene depend on one or more mutations at another gene. Epistasis is critical for understanding many genetic and evolutionary processes, including…
The evolution of the full repertoire of proteins encoded in a given genome is mostly driven by gene duplications, deletions, and sequence modifications of existing proteins. Indirect information about relative rates and other intrinsic…
The environment in which a population evolves can have a crucial impact on selection. We study evolutionary dynamics in finite populations of fixed size in a changing environment. The population dynamics are driven by birth and death…
We study the dynamics of an age-structured population in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of its parent. When advantageous mutation is favored, the average fitness of the population grows…
Most new mutations are deleterious and are eventually eliminated by natural selection. But in an adapting population, the rapid amplification of beneficial mutations can hinder the removal of deleterious variants in nearby regions of the…
Whether evolution can be predicted is a key question in evolutionary biology. Here we set out to better understand the repeatability of evolution. We explored experimentally the effect of mutation supply and the strength of selective…
Phenotypic variation is a hallmark of cellular physiology. Metabolic heterogeneity, in particular, underpins single-cell phenomena such as microbial drug tolerance and growth variability. Much research has focussed on transcriptomic and…
Understanding the relationship between protein sequence, function, and stability is a fundamental problem in biology. While high-throughput methods have produced large numbers of sequence-function pairs, functional assays do not distinguish…
We introduce a model of molecular evolution in which the fitness of an individual depends both on its own and on the parent's genotype. The model can be solved by means of a nonlinear mapping onto the standard quasispecies model. The…
We study the effect of intratumor heterogeneity in the likelihood of cancer cells moving from a primary tumor to other sites in the human body, generating a metastatic process. We model different scenarios of competition between tumor cells…