Related papers: The diversity of a distributed genome in bacterial…
Unraveling the evolutionary forces shaping bacterial diversity can today be tackled using a growing amount of genomic data. While the genome of eukaryotes is highly stable, bacterial genomes from cells of the same species highly vary in…
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…
Genes are not located randomly along genomes. Synteny, the conservation of their relative positions in genomes of different species, reflects fundamental constraints on natural evolution. We present approaches to infer pairs of co-localized…
Gene gains and losses have shaped the gene repertoire of species since the universal last common ancestor to species today. Genes in extant species were gained at different historical times via de novo creation of new genes, duplication of…
Background. The large-scale pattern of distribution of genes on the chromosomes in the known animal genomes is not well characterized. We hypothesized that individual genes will be distributed on chromosomes in a mathematically ordered…
Although the role of lateral gene transfer is well recognized in the evolution of bacteria, it is generally assumed that it has had less influence among eukaryotes. To explore this hypothesis we compare the dynamics of genome evolution in…
The differences between DNA-sequences within a population are the basis to infer the ancestral relationship of the individuals. Within the classical infinitely many sites model, it is possible to estimate the mutation rate based on the site…
In phylogenetic studies, the evolution of molecular sequences is assumed to have taken place along the phylogeny traced by the ancestors of extant species. In the presence of lateral gene transfer (LGT), however, this may not be the case,…
We apply recently developed inference methods based on general coalescent processes to DNA sequence data obtained from various marine species. Several of these species are believed to exhibit so-called shallow gene genealogies, potentially…
Bacteria are known to exchange genetic information by horizontal gene transfer. Since the frequency of homologous recombination depends on the similarity of recombining segments, several studies examined whether this could lead to the…
Large scale databases are available that contain homologous gene families constructed from hundreds of complete genome sequences from across the three domains of Life. Here we discuss approches of increasing complexity aimed at extracting…
We consider a model of a population in which individuals are sampled from different species. The Yule-Kingman nested coalescent describes the genealogy of the sample when each species merges with another randomly chosen species with a…
The phenomenon of gene conservation is an interesting evolutionary problem related to speciation and adaptation. Conserved genes are acted upon in evolution in a way that preserves their function despite other structural and functional…
We study a model of selection acting on a diploid population (one in which each individual carries two copies of each gene) living in one spatial dimension. We suppose a particular gene appears in two forms (alleles) $A$ and $a$, and that…
Bacteria, in contrast to eukaryotic cells contain two types of genes: chromosomal genes that are fixed to the cell, and plasmids that are mobile genes, easily shared to other cells. The sharing of plasmid genes between individual bacteria…
The biological world, especially its majority microbial component, is strongly interacting and may be dominated by collective effects. In this review, we provide a brief introduction for statistical physicists of the way in which living…
We investigate the infinitely many demes limit of the genealogy of a sample of individuals from a subdivided population subject to sporadic mass extinction events. By exploiting a separation of timescales property of Wright's island model,…
We present a genetic algorithm which is distributed in two novel ways: along genotype and temporal axes. Our algorithm first distributes, for every member of the population, a subset of the genotype to each network node, rather than a…
We consider neutral evolution of a large population subject to changes in its population size. For a population with a time-variable carrying capacity we have computed the distributions of the total branch lengths of its sample genealogies.…
Sweepstakes reproduction may be generated by chance matching of reproduction with favorable environmental conditions. Gene genealogies generated by sweepstakes reproduction are in the domain of attraction of multiple-merger coalescents…