Related papers: Transposable element sequence evolution is influen…
Ecological systems show a variety of characteristic patterns of biodiversity in space and time. It is a challenge for theory to find models that can reproduce and explain the observed patterns. Since the advent of island biogeography these…
In phylogenetic studies, the evolution of molecular sequences is assumed to have taken place along the phylogeny traced by the ancestors of extant species. In the presence of lateral gene transfer (LGT), however, this may not be the case,…
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…
The Euphrosyne asteroid family is uniquely situated at high inclination in the outer Main Belt, bisected by the nu_6 secular resonance. This large, low albedo family may thus be an important contributor to specific subpopulations of the…
In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability and…
Morphogenesis is the biological process that causes the emergence and changes of patterns (tissues and organs) in living organisms. It is a robust, self-organising mechanism, governed by Genetic Regulatory Networks (GRN), that hasn't been…
The existence of complex (multiple-step) genetic adaptations that are "irreducible" (i.e., all partial combinations are less fit than the original genotype) is one of the longest standing problems in evolutionary biology. In standard…
An important question in molecular evolution is whether an amino acid that occurs at a given position makes an independent contribution to fitness, or whether its effect depends on the state of other loci in the organism's genome, a…
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…
Entropy plays a key role in statistical physics of complex systems, which in general exhibit diverse aspects of emergence on different scales. However, it still remains not fully resolved how entropy varies with the coarse-graining level…
There is an intrinsic relationship between the molecular evolution in primordial period and the properties of genomes and proteomes of contemporary species. The genomic data may help us understand the driving force of evolution of life at…
We review and further develop an analytical model that describes how thermodynamic constraints on the stability of the native state influence protein evolution in a site-specific manner. To this end, we represent both protein sequences and…
Mercury, due to its close location to the Sun, is surrounded by an environment whose conditions may be considered as "extreme" in the entire Solar System. Both solar wind and radiation are stronger with respect to other Solar System bodies,…
Evolutionary scenarios describing the evolution of a family of genes within a collection of species comprise the mapping of the vertices of a gene tree $T$ to vertices and edges of a species tree $S$. The relative timing of the last common…
In this communication, direction of evolutionary variability of parameters of genome size and structurally functional activity of plants in angiosperm taxa among life forms, are analysed. It is shown that, in the Cretaceous-Cenozoic era,…
Transcription factor binding sites vary in their specificity, both within and between species. Binding specificity has a strong impact on the evolution of gene expression, because it determines how easily regulatory interactions are gained…
The X chromosome is present as a single copy in the heterogametic sex, and this hemizygosity is expected to drive unusual patterns of evolution on the X relative to the autosomes. For example, the hemizgosity of the X may lead to a lower…
The sequence of a protein is not only constrained by its physical and biochemical properties under current selection, but also by features of its past evolutionary history. Understanding the extent and the form that these evolutionary…
The adaptive evolution of a population under the influence of mutation and selection is strongly influenced by the structure of the underlying fitness landscape, which encodes the interactions between mutations at different genetic loci.…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…