Related papers: Response to Horizontal gene transfer may explain v…
Bacteria are known to exchange genetic information by horizontal gene transfer. Since the frequency of homologous recombination depends on the similarity of recombining segments, several studies examined whether this could lead to the…
Dynamical properties of the transcriptional regulatory network of {\it Escherichia coli} and {\it Saccharomyces cerevisiae} are studied within the framework of random Boolean functions. The dynamical response of these networks to a single…
Statistical fluctuations in population sizes of microbes may be quite large depending on the nature of their underlying stochastic dynamics. For example, the variance of the population size of a microbe undergoing a pure birth process with…
We consider the hypothesis that Evolution promotes population-wide genome patterns that, under randomization, ensures the External Validity of adaptations across population members. An adaptation is Externally Valid (EV) if its effect holds…
While Neutral Theory famously describes the number of discrete genetic differences in populations, we consider the number of genetic backgrounds under which such differences are observed - setting limits to the generalizability of their…
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…
The relationship between sequences and secondary structures or shapes in RNA exhibits robust statistical properties summarized by three notions: (1) the notion of a typical shape (that among all sequences of fixed length certain shapes are…
Under constant selection, each trait has a fixed fitness, and small mutation rates allow populations to efficiently exploit the optimal trait. Therefore it is reasonable to expect mutation rates will evolve downwards. However, we find this…
We present new analytical estimates of the large scale bias of neutral hydrogen (HI). We use a simple, non-parametric model which monotonically relates the total mass of a halo M_tot with its HI mass M_HI at zero redshift; for earlier times…
The study of common heritability, or co-heritability, among multiple traits has been widely established in quantitative and molecular genetics. However, in bacteria, genome-based estimation of heritability has only been considered very…
This paper tackles the problem of detecting abrupt changes in the mean of a heteroscedastic signal by model selection, without knowledge on the variations of the noise. A new family of change-point detection procedures is proposed, showing…
Data from a long time evolution experiment with Escherichia Coli and from a large study on copy number variations in subjects with european ancestry are analyzed in order to argue that mutations can be described as Levy flights in the…
RNA viruses provide prominent examples of measurably evolving populations. In HIV infection, the development of drug resistance is of particular interest, because precise predictions of the outcome of this evolutionary process are a…
The spread of infectious disease and the evolution of antigenically distinct strains are often modeled separately, despite strong feedbacks mediated by host immune memory and heterogeneous contacts. To tackle this challenging problem, we…
Constraints on changes in expression levels across all cell components imposed by the steady growth of cells have recently been discussed both experimentally and theoretically. By assuming a small environmental perturbation and considering…
Non-genetic forms of antimicrobial drug resistance can result from cell-to-cell variability that is not encoded in the genetic material. Data from recent studies also suggest that non-genetic mechanisms can facilitate the development of…
We introduce a family of models incorporating random segmental substitutions and point mutations and demonstrate that such models reproduce algebraic length distributions of exact matches with the slope $-4$ observed earlier in pairwise…
Spatial transcriptomics offers spatially resolved gene expression profiling within tissue sections, but its cost and limited throughput hinder large-scale deployment. To extend this capability to routine practice, recent computational…
The effect of sequence heterogeneity on polynucleotide translocation across a pore and on simple models of molecular motors such as helicases, DNA polymerase/exonuclease and RNA polymerase is studied in detail. Pore translocation of RNA or…
RNA secondary structure is an important computational model to understand how genetic variation maps into phenotypic (structural) variation. Evolutionary innovation in RNA structures is facilitated by neutral networks, large connected sets…