Related papers: An Evolutionary Reduction Principle for Mutation R…
The persistence of life requires populations to adapt at a rate commensurate with the dynamics of their environment. Successful populations that inhabit highly variable environments have evolved mechanisms to increase the likelihood of…
We consider an infinitely large population under stabilising selection and mutation in which the allelic effects determining a polygenic trait vary between loci. We obtain analytical expressions for the stationary genetic variance as a…
Genetic diversity is central to the process of evolution. Both natural selection and random genetic drift are influenced by the level of genetic diversity of a population; selection acts on diversity while drift samples from it. At a given…
I study a population model in which the reproduction rate lambda is inherited with mutation, favoring fast reproducers in the short term, but conflicting with a process that eliminates agglomerations of individuals. The model is a variant…
The most common representation in evolutionary computation are bit strings. This is ideal to model binary decision variables, but less useful for variables taking more values. With very little theoretical work existing on how to use…
Identifying and quantifying the benefits of sex and recombination is a long standing problem in evolutionary theory. In particular, contradictory claims have been made about the existence of a benefit of recombination on high dimensional…
Exploring the genetic basis of heritable traits remains one of the central challenges in biomedical research. In simple cases, single polymorphic loci explain a significant fraction of the phenotype variability. However, many traits of…
Recent work on mutation-selection models has revealed that, under specific assumptions on the fitness function and the mutation rates, asymptotic estimates for the leading eigenvalue of the mutation-reproduction matrix may be obtained…
We present a new method for proving lower bounds on the expected running time of evolutionary algorithms. It is based on fitness-level partitions and an additional condition on transition probabilities between fitness levels. The method is…
We investigate a multi-locus evolutionary model which is based on the DNA shuffling protocol widely applied in \textit{in vitro} directed evolution. This model incorporates selection, recombination and point mutations. The simplicity of the…
Mutation rate variation across loci is well known to cause difficulties, notably identifiability issues, in the reconstruction of evolutionary trees from molecular sequences. Here we introduce a new approach for estimating general…
The drift-barrier hypothesis states that random genetic drift constrains the refinement of a phenotype under natural selection. The influence of effective population size and the genome-wide deleterious mutation rate were studied…
Resistance to insecticide is considered nowadays one of the major threats to insect control, as its occurrence reduces drastically the efficiency of chemical control campaigns, and may also perturb the application of other control methods,…
The widespread adoption of transfer learning has revolutionized machine learning by enabling efficient adaptation of pre-trained models to new domains. However, the reliability of these adaptations remains poorly understood, particularly…
We revisit the classical population genetics model of a population evolving under multiplicative selection, mutation and drift. The number of beneficial alleles in a multi-locus system can be considered a trait under exponential selection.…
In a letter published in Molecular Biology Evolution [10], Chen and Zhang argue that the variation of the mutation rate along the Escherichia coli genome that we recently reported [3] cannot be evolutionarily optimised. To support this…
Multilevel selection occurs when short-term individual-level reproductive interests conflict with longer-term group-level fitness effects. Detecting and quantifying this phenomenon is key to understanding evolution of traits ranging from…
Genome-wide patterns of genetic divergence reveal mechanisms of adaptation under gene flow. Empirical data show that divergence is mostly concentrated in narrow genomic regions. This pattern may arise because differentiated loci protect…
We consider the evolution of populations under the joint action of mutation and differential reproduction, or selection. The population is modelled as a finite-type Markov branching process in continuous time, and the associated…
Empirical substitution matrices represent the average tendencies of substitutions over various protein families by sacrificing gene-level resolution. We develop a codon-based model, in which mutational tendencies of codon, a genetic code,…