Related papers: Statistical Mechanics of Horizontal Gene Transfer …
Chromosomal crossovers play a crucial role in meiotic cell division, as they ensure proper chromosome segregation and increase genetic variability. Experiments have consistently revealed two key observations across species: (i) the number…
Horizontal transfer (HT) of heritable information or `traits' (carried by genetic elements, endosymbionts, or culture) is widespread among living organisms. Yet current ecological and evolutionary theory addressing HT is limited. We present…
The generation of anisotropic shapes occurs during morphogenesis of almost all organisms. With the recent renewal of the interest in mechanical aspects of morphogenesis, it has become clear that mechanics contributes to anisotropic forms in…
Plasmids are major players in Horizontal Gene Transfer mechanisms, hence they are highly variable in their gene content and length. We propose a model for the fitness of a plasmid as a function of its length, which predicts diminishing…
Living systems relay information across membrane interfaces to coordinate compartment functions. We identify a physical mechanism for selective information transmission that arises from the sigmoidal response of surface-bound particle…
We study the evolution of artificial learning systems by means of selection. Genetic programming is used to generate a sequence of populations of algorithms which can be used by neural networks for supervised learning of a rule that…
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…
We propose a class of evolutionary models that involves an arbitrary exchangeable process as the breeding process and different selection schemes. In those models, a new genome is born according to the breeding process, and then a genome is…
Ecology and evolution are inseparable. Motivated by some recent experiments, we have developed models of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which…
A theoretical and experimental analysis is made of the effects of self-adaptation in a simple evolving system. Specifically, we consider the effects of coding the mutation and crossover probabilities of a genetic algorithm evolving in…
Evolution of genetic code is studied as the change in the choice of enzymes that are used to synthesize amino acids from the genetic information of nucleic acids. We propose the following theory: the differentiation of physiological states…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
Geographic structure can affect patterns of genetic differentiation and speciation rates. In this article, we investigate the dynamics of genetic distances in a geographically structured metapopulation. We model the metapopulation as a…
We consider a Moran-type model of cultural evolution, which describes how traits emerge, are transmitted, and get lost in populations. Our analysis focuses on the underlying cultural genealogies; they were first described by Aguilar and…
Spatial distributions of morphogens provide positional information in developing systems, but how the distributions are established and maintained remains an open problem. Transport by diffusion has been the traditional mechanism, but…
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…
The margins within the geographic range of species are often specific in terms of ecological and evolutionary processes, and can strongly influence the species' reaction to climate change. One of the frequently observed features at range…
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…
Communication between cells is realized by exchange of biochemical substances. Due to internal organization of living systems and variability of external parameters, the exchange is heavily influenced by perturbations of various parameters…
The long-term growth rate of populations in varying environments quantifies the evolutionary value of processing the information that biological individuals inherit from their ancestors and acquire from their environment. Previous models…