Related papers: Estimating the Strength of Selective Sweeps from D…
Network surveys of key populations at risk for HIV are an essential part of the effort to understand how the epidemic spreads and how it can be prevented. Estimation of population values from the sample data has been probematical, however,…
Positive selection distorts the structure of genealogies and hence alters patterns of genetic variation within a population. Most analyses of these distortions focus on the signatures of hitchhiking due to hard or soft selective sweeps at a…
Our models for detecting the effect of adaptation on population genomic diversity are often predicated on a single newly arisen mutation sweeping rapidly to fixation. However, a population can also adapt to a new situation by multiple…
We consider a biological population in which a beneficial mutation is undergoing a selective sweep when a second beneficial mutation arises at a linked locus and we investigate the probability that both mutations will eventually fix in the…
When an advantageous mutation occurs in a population, the favorable allele may spread to the entire population in a short time, an event known as a selective sweep. As a result, when we sample $n$ individuals from a population and trace…
We use a microscopic model of population dynamics, a modified version of the well known Penna model, to study some aspects of microevolution. This research is motivated by recent reports on the effect of selective hunting on the gene pool…
The domestication and subsequent selection by humans to create breeds of cattle undoubtedly altered the patterning of variation within their genomes. Strong selection to fix advantageous large-effect mutations underlying domesticability,…
Recurrent mutations are a common phenomenon in population genetics. They may be at the origin of the fixation of a new genotype, if they give a phenotypic advantage to the carriers of the new mutation. In this paper, we are interested in…
Natural populations often show enhanced genetic drift consistent with a strong skew in their offspring number distribution. The skew arises because the variability of family sizes is either inherently strong or amplified by population…
Evolutionary dynamics and patterns of molecular evolution are strongly influenced by selection on linked regions of the genome, but our quantitative understanding of these effects remains incomplete. Recent work has focused on predicting…
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…
We are interested in modelling Darwinian evolution, resulting from the interplay of phenotypic variation and natural selection through ecological interactions. Our models are rooted in the microscopic, stochastic description of a population…
The accumulation of beneficial mutations on many competing genetic backgrounds in rapidly adapting populations has a striking impact on evolutionary dynamics. This effect, known as clonal interference, causes erratic fluctuations in the…
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…
Evolutionary forces shape patterns of genetic diversity within populations and contribute to phenotypic variation. In particular, recurrent positive selection has attracted significant interest in both theoretical and empirical studies.…
How the neutral diversity is affected by selection and adaptation is investigated in an eco-evolutionary framework. In our model, we study a finite population in continuous time, where each individual is characterized by a trait under…
We study the response of a quantitative trait to exponential directional selection in a finite haploid population at the genetic and the phenotypic level. We assume an infinite sites model, in which the number of new mutations per…
Respondent-driven sampling is a form of link-tracing network sampling, which is widely used to study hard-to-reach populations, often to estimate population proportions. Previous treatments of this process have used a with-replacement…
Identifying drivers of complex traits from the noisy signals of genetic variation obtained from high throughput genome sequencing technologies is a central challenge faced by human geneticists today. We hypothesize that the variants…
Within the framework of population genetics we consider the evolution of an asexual haploid population under the effect of a rapidly varying natural selection (microevolution). We focus on the case in which the environment exerting…