Related papers: Statistical Genetics and Evolution of Quantitative…
Modelling the evolution of a continuous trait in a biological population is one of the oldest problems in evolutionary biology, which led to the birth of quantitative genetics. With the recent development of GWAS methods, it has become…
A central question in evolutionary biology is how to quantitatively understand the dynamics of genetically diverse populations. Modeling the genotype distribution is challenging, as it ultimately requires tracking all correlations (or…
In the classic view introduced by R. A. Fisher, a quantitative trait is encoded by many loci with small, additive effects. Recent advances in QTL mapping have begun to elucidate the genetic architectures underlying vast numbers of…
This review is about statistical genetics, an interdisciplinary topic between statistical physics and population biology. The focus is on the phase of quasi-linkage equilibrium (QLE). Our goals here are to clarify under which conditions the…
Genetic systems with multiple loci can have complex dynamics. For example, mean fitness need not always increase and stable cycling is possible. Here, we study the dynamics of a genetic system inspired by the molecular biology of…
Selection, mutation and random drift affect the dynamics of allele frequencies and consequently of quantitative traits. While the macroscopic dynamics of quantitative traits can be measured, the underlying allele frequencies are typically…
Describing the evolution of a population of genomes evolving in a complex fitness landscape is generally very hard. We here introduce an approximate Gaussian closure scheme to characterize analytically the statistics of a genomic population…
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…
The phase of Quasi-Linkage Equilibrium (QLE) in evolutionary populations is analogous to the thermal equilibrium state in statistical mechanics, a concept pioneered by Kimura in 1965 for two-locus two-allele models. QLE describes a…
Adaptation in response to selection on polygenic phenotypes may occur via subtle allele frequencies shifts at many loci. Current population genomic techniques are not well posed to identify such signals. In the past decade, detailed…
Many experimental and field studies have shown that adaptation can occur very rapidly. Two qualitatively different modes of fast adaptation have been proposed: selective sweeps wherein large shifts in the allele frequencies occur at a few…
Background and Aims: Prediction of phenotypic traits from new genotypes under untested environmental conditions is crucial to build simulations of breeding strategies to improve target traits. Although the plant response to environmental…
1) Micro-evolutionary predictions are complicated by ecological feedbacks like density dependence, while ecological predictions can be complicated by evolutionary change. A widely used approach in micro-evolution, quantitative genetics,…
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…
A quasispecies is a set of interrelated genotypes that have reached a situation of equilibrium while evolving according to the usual Darwinian principles of selection and mutation. Quasispecies studies invariably assume that it is possible…
Numerous traits under migration-selection balance are shown to exhibit complex patterns of genetic architecture with large variance in effect sizes. However, the conditions under which such genetic architectures are stable have yet to be…
We consider a population evolving due to mutation, selection and recombination, where selection includes single-locus terms (additive fitness) and two-loci terms (pairwise epistatic fitness). We further consider the problem of inferring…
Genetic association study is an essential step to discover genetic factors that are associated with a complex trait of interest. In this paper we present a novel generalized quasi-likelihood score (GQLS) test that is suitable for a study…
Large populations may contain numerous simultaneously segregating polymorphisms subject to natural selection. Since selection acts on individuals whose fitness depends on many loci, different loci affect each other's dynamics. This leads to…
Although many phenotypic traits are determined by a large number of genetic variants, the behavior of allele frequencies in a polygenic trait is not completely understood. The problem is especially challenging when the quantitative trait of…