Related papers: The role of haplotype complementation and purifyin…
Intragenomic recombination (crossover) is a very important evolutionary mechanism. The crossover events are not evenly distributed along the natural chromosomes. Monte Carlo simulations revealed that frequency of recombinations decides…
Using Monte Carlo model of biological evolution we have discovered that populations can switch between two different strategies of their genomes' evolution; Darwinian purifying selection and complementing the haplotypes. The first one is…
In the human genomes, recombination frequency between homologous chromosomes during meiosis is highly correlated with their physical length while it differs significantly when their coding density is considered. Furthermore, it has been…
We have used the Monte Carlo based computer models to show that selection pressure could affect the distribution of recombination hotspots along the chromosome. Close to critical crossover rate, where genomes may switch between the…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
Maintenance of sexual reproduction and genetic recombination imposes physiological costs when compared to parthenogenic reproduction, most prominently: for maintaining the corresponding (molecular) machinery, for finding a mating partner,…
Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…
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…
Some species exhibit very high levels of DNA sequence variability; there is also evidence for the existence of heritable epigenetic variants that experience state changes at a much higher rate than sequence variants. In both cases, the…
This theory seeks to define species and to explore evolutionary forces and genetic elements in speciation and species maintenance. The theory explains how speciation and species maintenance are caused by natural selection acting on…
Recruitment dynamics, or the distribution of the number of offspring among individuals, is central for understanding ecology and evolution. Sweepstakes reproduction (heavy right-tailed offspring number distribution) is central for…
Evolving genomes increase a number of their genes by gene duplications. To escape degradation in a functionless pseudogene, any gene duplicate needs to be guarded by negative (purifying) selection from otherwise inevitable fixation of…
Meiotic recombination is a fundamental feature of sexually reproducing species. It is often required for proper chromosome segregation and plays important role in adaptation and the maintenance of genetic diversity. The molecular mechanisms…
We consider a population of haploid individuals reproducing sexually, i.e. for which the genome of each individual is a random mixture of the genome of its two parents. We assume that initially one individual carries a mutation at one…
The deterministic selection-recombination equation describes the evolution of the genetic type composition of a population under selection and recombination in a law of large numbers regime. So far, an explicit solution has seemed out of…
Current-day genomes bear the mark of the evolutionary processes. One of the strongest indications is the sequence homology among families of proteins that perform similar biological functions in different species. The number of proteins in…
Supergenes are genomic regions containing sets of tightly linked loci that control multi-trait phenotypic polymorphisms under balancing selection. Recent advances in genomics have uncovered significant variation in both the genomic…
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…
Background: Hybridogenesis is a very interesting example of reproduction which seems to integrate the sexual and clonal processes in one system. In a case of frogs, described in the paper, two parental species - Rana lessonae and Rana…