Related papers: The evolution of genetic architectures underlying …
The evolution of genetic systems has been analyzed through the use of modifier gene models, in which a neutral gene is posited to control the transmission of other genes under selection. Analysis of modifier gene models has found the…
For many traits, including susceptibility to common diseases in humans, causal loci uncovered by genetic mapping studies explain only a minority of the heritable contribution to trait variation. Multiple explanations for this "missing…
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…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…
We investigate the evolutionary dynamics of a population structured in phenotype, subjected to trait dependent selection with a linearly moving optimum and an asexual mode of reproduction. Our model consists of a non-local and non-linear…
Many biological phenomena undergo developmental changes in time and space. Functional mapping, which is aimed at mapping genes that affect developmental patterns, is instrumental for studying the genetic architecture of biological changes.…
We investigate a simple quantitative genetics model subjet to a gradual environmental change from the viewpoint of the phylogenies of the living individuals. We aim to understand better how the past traits of their ancestors are shaped by…
We introduce a multi-allele Wright-Fisher model with non-recurrent, reversible mutation and directional selection. In this setting, the allele frequencies at a single locus track the path of a hybrid jump-diffusion process with state space…
Population genetic studies have found evidence for dramatic population growth in recent human history. It is unclear how this recent population growth, combined with the effects of negative natural selection, has affected patterns of…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
Over the last fifty years, geneticists have made great strides in understanding how our species' evolutionary history gave rise to current patterns of human genetic diversity classically summarized by Lewontin in his 1972 paper, 'The…
We investigate a continuous time, probability measure-valued dynamical system that describes the process of mutation-selection balance in a context where the population is infinite, there may be infinitely many loci, and there are weak…
An expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) is a chromosomal region where genetic variants are associated with the expression levels of certain genes that can be both nearby or distant. The identifications of eQTLs for different tissues,…
Complexity in biology is often described using a multi-map architecture, where the genotype, representing the encoded information, is mapped to the functional level, known as the phenotype, which is then connected to a latent phenotype we…
Migrations have played an important role in shaping the genetic diversity of human populations. Understanding genomic data thus requires careful modeling of historical gene flow. Here we consider the effect of relatively recent population…
Evolutionary graph theory has grown to be an area of intense study. Despite the amount of interest in the field, it seems to have grown separate from other subfields of population genetics and evolution. In the current work I introduce the…
By exploiting an analogy between population genetics and statistical mechanics, we study the evolution of a polygenic trait under stabilizing selection, mutation, and genetic drift. This requires us to track only four macroscopic variables,…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
In evolutionary dynamics, a key measure of a mutant trait's success is the probability that it takes over the population given some initial mutant-appearance distribution. This "fixation probability" is difficult to compute in general, as…
We consider a stochastic model for the evolution of a discrete population structured by a trait with values on a finite grid of the torus, and with mutation and selection. Traits are vertically inherited unless a mutation occurs, and…