Related papers: Response to Horizontal gene transfer may explain v…
In this paper we develop and test algorithmic techniques to estimate genotypes fitnesses by analysis of observed daily frequency data monitoring the long-term evolution of bacterial populations. In particular, we develop a non-linear least…
Motivation: Whole-genome high-coverage sequencing has been widely used for personal and cancer genomics as well as in various research areas. However, in the lack of an unbiased whole-genome truth set, the global error rate of variant calls…
Differential evolution (DE) is a well-known type of evolutionary algorithms (EA). Similarly to other EA variants it can suffer from small populations and loose diversity too quickly. This paper presents a new approach to mitigate this…
Epigenetic histone modifications play an important role in the maintenance of different cell phenotypes. The exact molecular mechanism for inheritance of the modification patterns over cell generations remains elusive. We construct a…
Phylogenetic analyses based on small to moderately sized sets of sequential data lead to overestimating mutation rates in influenza hemagglutinin (HA) by at least an order of magnitude. Two major underlying reasons are: the incomplete…
Neutral landscapes and mutational robustness are believed to be important enablers of evolvability in biology. We apply these concepts to software, defining mutational robustness to be the fraction of random mutations that leave a program's…
Heterogeneity in physical and functional characteristics of cells (e.g. size, cycle time, growth rate, protein concentration) proliferates within an isogenic population due to stochasticity in intracellular biochemical processes and in the…
The biological world, especially its majority microbial component, is strongly interacting and may be dominated by collective effects. In this review, we provide a brief introduction for statistical physicists of the way in which living…
Hypothesis transfer learning (HTL) contrasts domain adaptation by allowing for a previous task leverage, named the source, into a new one, the target, without requiring access to the source data. Indeed, HTL relies only on a hypothesis…
Based on a recent model of evolving viruses competing with an adapting immune system [1], we study the conditions under which a viral quasispecies can maximize its growth rate. The range of mutation rates that allows viruses to thrive is…
Neutral evolution assumes that there are no selective forces distinguishing different variants in a population. Despite this striking assumption, many recent studies have sought to assess whether neutrality can provide a good description of…
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 scale databases are available that contain homologous gene families constructed from hundreds of complete genome sequences from across the three domains of Life. Here we discuss approches of increasing complexity aimed at extracting…
It is well established that a wide variety of phenomena in cellular and molecular biology involve anomalous transport e.g. the statistics for the motility of cells and molecules are fractional and do not conform to the archetypes of simple…
Chronic infections of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) create a very complex co-evolutionary process, where the virus tries to escape the continuously adapting host immune system. Quantitative details of this process are largely…
We propose a new test case prioritization technique that combines both mutation-based and diversity-based approaches. Our diversity-aware mutation-based technique relies on the notion of mutant distinguishment, which aims to distinguish one…
Empirical evidence is presented which contradicts the established interpretation of the intraspecific genetic variability as the adaptive potential of the species: the uniform evolutionary tempo across the life kingdom, species…
Gene sequences of a deme evolve over time as new chromosome inversions appear in a population via mutations, some of which will replace an existing sequence. The underlying biochemical processes that generates these and other mutations are…
We present stochastic, finite-population formulations of the Crow-Kimura and Eigen models of quasispecies theory, for fitness functions that depend in an arbitrary way on the number of mutations from the wild type. We include back mutations…
The neutral mutation rate is known to vary widely along human chromosomes, leading to mutational hot and cold regions. We provide evidence that categories of functionally-related genes reside preferentially in mutationally hot or cold…