Related papers: Detecting gene innovations for phenotypic diversit…
Identifying genes associated with complex human diseases is one of the main challenges of human genetics and computational medicine. To answer this question, millions of genetic variants get screened to identify a few of importance. To…
High-throughput sequencing (HTS) is revolutionizing biological research by enabling scientists to quickly and cheaply query variation at a genomic scale. Despite the increasing ease of obtaining such data, using these data effectively still…
Understanding which phenotypic traits are consistently correlated throughout evolution is a highly pertinent problem in modern evolutionary biology. Here, we propose a multivariate phylogenetic latent liability model for assessing the…
The genotype-phenotype map is an essential object in our understanding of organismal complexity and adaptive properties, determining at once genomic plasticity and those constraints that may limit the ability of genomes to attain…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
Motivation: Millions of genes in the modern species belong to only thousands of `gene families'. A gene family includes instances of the same gene in different species (orthologs) and duplicate genes in the same species (paralogs). Genes…
Phylogenetics is the study of the evolutionary relationships between organisms. One of the main challenges in the field is to take biological data for a group of organisms and to infer an evolutionary tree, a graph that represents these…
Genomic phenotypes, such as DNA methylation and chromatin accessibility, can be used to characterize the transcriptional and regulatory activity of DNA within a cell. Recent technological advances have made it possible to measure such…
The association of a given human phenotype to a genetic variant remains a critical challenge for biology. We present a novel system called PhenoLinker capable of associating a score to a phenotype-gene relationship by using heterogeneous…
Phylogenetic comparative analysis is an approach to inferring evolutionary process from a combination of phylogenetic and phenotypic data. The last few years have seen increasingly sophisticated models employed in the evaluation of more and…
Gene expression microarray technologies provide the simultaneous measurements of a large number of genes. Typical analyses of such data focus on the individual genes, but recent work has demonstrated that evaluating changes in expression…
A phylogeny describes the evolutionary history of an evolving population. Evolutionary search algorithms can perfectly track the ancestry of candidate solutions, illuminating a population's trajectory through the search space. However,…
A key goal in studies of ecology and evolution is understanding the causes of phenotypic diversity in nature. Most traits of interest, such as those relating to morphology, life-history, immunity and behaviour are quantitative, and…
Mapping genotypes to phenotypes (G2P) is a fundamental goal in biology. So called PhyloG2P methods are a relatively new set of tools that leverage replicated evolution in phylogenetically independent lineages to identify genomic regions…
Detecting changepoints in a time series of length $N$ entails evaluating up to $2^{N-1}$ possible changepoint models, making exhaustive enumeration computationally infeasible. Genetic algorithms (GAs) provide a stochastic way to identify…
Phylogenetic trees are simple models of evolutionary processes. They describe conditionally independent divergent evolution of taxa from common ancestors. Phylogenetic trees commonly do not have enough flexibility to adequately model all…
The phenotype of any organism on earth is, in large part, the consequence of interplay between numerous gene products encoded in the genome, and such interplay between gene products affects the evolutionary fate of the genome itself through…
Diversity is an important factor in evolutionary algorithms to prevent premature convergence towards a single local optimum. In order to maintain diversity throughout the process of evolution, various means exist in literature. We analyze…
Genome variants which re-occur independently across evolutionary lineages are key molecular signatures of adaptation. Inferring the dynamics of such genetic changes from pandemic-scale genomic datasets is now possible, which opens up…
Genetic algorithms, computer programs that simulate natural evolution, are increasingly applied across many disciplines. They have been used to solve various optimisation problems from neural network architecture search to strategic games,…