Related papers: Characteristics of transposable element exonizatio…
Evolution of gene regulation is crucial for our understanding of the phenotypic differences between species, populations and individuals. Sequence-specific binding of transcription factors to the regulatory regions on the DNA is a key…
As organisms are faced with intense rapidly changing selective pressures, new genetic material is required to facilitate adaptation. Among sources of genetic novelty, gene duplications and transposable elements (TEs) offer new genes or new…
Mutations are typically classified by their effects on the nucleotide sequence and by their size. Here, we argue that if our main aim is to understand the effect of mutations on evolutionary outcomes (such as adaptation or speciation), we…
The fitness contribution of an allele at one genetic site may depend on alleles at other sites, a phenomenon known as epistasis. Epistasis can profoundly influence the process of evolution in populations under selection, and can shape the…
Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) account for most variations between human genomes. We show how, if the genomes in a database differ only by a reasonable number of SNPs and the substrings between those SNPs are unique, then we can…
Condensation of hundreds of mega-base-pair-long human chromosomes in a small nuclear volume is a spectacular phenomenon. This process is driven by the formation of chromosome loops. ATP consuming motor, condensin, interacts with chromatin…
We propose an analysis for a novel experiment intended to locate the genetic locus Xce (X-chromosome controlling element), which biases the stochastic process of X-inactivation in the mouse. X-inactivation bias is a phenomenon where cells…
Transcriptional repressor CTCF is an important regulator of chromatin 3D structure, facilitating the formation of topologically associating domains (TADs). However, its direct effects on gene regulation is less well understood. Here, we…
Recently the physical characterization of a number of biological processes has proven indispensable for a full understanding of natural phenomena. One such example is the mechanical properties of transcription, which have been shown to have…
Even under constant external conditions, the expression levels of genes fluctuate. Much emphasis has been placed on the components of this noise that are due to randomness in transcription and translation; here we analyze the role of noise…
A variety of genome transformations can occur as a microbial population adapts to a large environmental change. In particular, genomic surveys indicate that, following the transition to an obligate, host-dependent symbiont, the density of…
Predicting protein properties is paramount for biological and medical advancements. Current protein engineering mutates on a typical protein, called the wild-type, to construct a family of homologous proteins and study their properties.…
The problem of differentiating the informational content of coding (exons) and non-coding (introns) regions of a DNA sequence is one of the central problems of genomics. The introns are estimated to be nearly 95% of the DNA and since they…
Motivated by a non-random but clustered distribution of SNPs, we introduce a phenomenological model to account for the clustering properties of SNPs in the human genome. The phenomenological model is based on a preferential mutation to the…
Cells are known to utilize biochemical noise to probabilistically switch between distinct gene expression states. We demonstrate that such noise-driven switching is dominated by tails of probability distributions and is therefore…
Chromatin remodeling machineries are abundant and diverse in eukaryotic cells. They have been involved in a variety of situations such as histone exchange and DNA repair, but their importance in gene expression remains unclear. Although the…
Electronic properties of DNA are believed to play a crucial role in many phenomena in living organisms, for example the location of DNA lesions by base excision repair (BER) glycosylases and the regulation of tumor-suppressor genes such as…
Measuring natural selection on genomic elements involved in the cis-regulation of gene expression -- such as transcriptional enhancers and promoters -- is critical for understanding the evolution of genomes, yet it remains a major…
Tokens serve as the basic units of representation in DNA language models (DNALMs), yet their design remains underexplored. Unlike natural language, DNA lacks inherent token boundaries or predefined compositional rules, making tokenization a…
Many transcription factors bind to DNA with a remarkable lack of specificity, so that regulatory binding sites compete with an enormous number of non-regulatory 'decoy' sites. For an auto-regulated gene, we show decoy sites decrease noise…