Related papers: Reconstructing Roma history from genome-wide data
Admixed populations are formed by the merging of two or more ancestral populations, and the ancestry of each locus in an admixed genome derives from either source. Consider a simple "pulse" admixture model, where populations A and B merged…
The idea that all life on earth traces back to a common beginning dates back at least to Charles Darwin's {\em Origin of Species}. Ever since, biologists have tried to piece together parts of this `tree of life' based on what we can observe…
The language commonly used in human genetics can inadvertently pose problems for multiple reasons. Terms like "ancestry", "ethnicity", and other ways of grouping people can have complex, often poorly understood, or multiple meanings within…
The online diffusion of information related to Europe and migration has been little investigated from an external point of view. However, this is a very relevant topic, especially if users have had no direct contact with Europe and its…
Replication of genetic material is an important process for all living organisms. Origins of replication initiate the copying of DNA at many points on a chromosome, and it is the distribution of these points that is relevant here, as it…
Although the role of lateral gene transfer is well recognized in the evolution of bacteria, it is generally assumed that it has had less influence among eukaryotes. To explore this hypothesis we compare the dynamics of genome evolution in…
A pedigree is a directed graph that describes how individuals are related through ancestry in a sexually-reproducing population. In this paper we explore the question of whether one can reconstruct a pedigree by just observing sequence data…
Recent improvements in high-throughput genotyping and sequencing technologies have afforded the collection of massive, genome-wide datasets of DNA information from hundreds of thousands of individuals. These datasets, in turn, provide…
Demographic models built from genetic data play important roles in illuminating prehistorical events and serving as null models in genome scans for selection. We introduce an inference method based on the joint frequency spectrum of genetic…
The phenomenon of gene conservation is an interesting evolutionary problem related to speciation and adaptation. Conserved genes are acted upon in evolution in a way that preserves their function despite other structural and functional…
Computational historical linguistics seeks to systematically understand processes of sound change, including during periods at which little to no formal recording of language is attested. At the same time, few computational resources exist…
Scientists have been trying to identify all of the genes in the human genome since the initial draft of the genome was published in 2001. Over the intervening years, much progress has been made in identifying protein-coding genes, and the…
As an open and collaborative knowledge graph created by users and bots, it is possible that the knowledge in Wikidata is biased in regards to multiple factors such as gender, race, and country of citizenship. Previous work has mostly…
Growth of the world population and the world economic growth were hyperbolic in the past 2,000,000 years. Recently, from around 1950, they started to be diverted to slower trajectories but they are still close to the historical hyperbolic…
We scanned through the genomes of 29,141 African Americans, searching for loci where the average proportion of African ancestry deviates significantly from the genome-wide average. We failed to find any genome-wide significant deviations,…
The genetic diversity of a species is shaped by its recent evolutionary history and can be used to infer demographic events or selective sweeps. Most inference methods are based on the null hypothesis that natural selection is a weak or…
The genome of a 650 year old Yersinia pestis bacteria, responsible for the medieval Black Death, was recently sequenced and assembled into 2,105 contigs from the main chromosome. According to the point mutation record, the medieval bacteria…
Did migrants make Paris a Mecca for the arts and Vienna a beacon of classical music? Or was their rise a pure consequence of local actors? Here, we use data on more than 22,000 historical individuals born between the years 1000 and 2000 to…
The evolution of languages closely resembles the evolution of haploid organisms. This similarity has been recently exploited \cite{GA,GJ} to construct language trees. The key point is the definition of a distance among all pairs of…
(ABRIDGED) We report the genome sequencing of 139 wild-derived strains of D. melanogaster, representing 22 population samples from the sub-Saharan ancestral range of this species, along with one European population. Most genomes were…