Related papers: Role of genetic polymorphisms in transgenerational…
Heritable differences in gene expression between individuals are an important source of phenotypic variation. The question of how closely the effects of genetic variation on protein levels mirror those on mRNA levels remains open. Here, we…
Most common SNPs are popularly assumed to be neutral. We here developed novel methods to examine in animal models and humans whether extreme amount of minor alleles (MAs) carried by an individual may represent extreme trait values and…
Epigenetic aberrations have profound effects on phenotypic output. Genome wide methylation alterations are inheritable to pass down the aberrations through multiple generations. We developed a statistical method, Genome-wide Identification…
Most non-synonymous mutations are thought to be deleterious because of their effect on protein sequence. These polymorphisms are expected to be removed or kept at low frequency by the action of natural selection, and rare deleterious…
Despite the greater functional importance of protein levels, our knowledge of gene expression evolution is based almost entirely on studies of mRNA levels. In contrast, our understanding of how translational regulation evolves has lagged…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
When polygenic traits are under stabilizing selection, many different combinations of alleles allow close adaptation to the optimum. If alleles have equal effects, all combinations that result in the same deviation from the optimum are…
Large populations may contain numerous simultaneously segregating polymorphisms subject to natural selection. Since selection acts on individuals whose fitness depends on many loci, different loci affect each other's dynamics. This leads to…
Understanding the patterns and causes of phenotypic divergence is a central goal in evolutionary biology. Much work has shown that mRNA abundance is highly variable between closely related species. However, the extent and mechanisms of…
Background: Transposable elements (TEs) in eukaryote genomes are quantitatively the main components affecting genome size, structure and expression. The dynamics of their insertion and deletion depend on diverse factors varying in strength…
The outcomes of evolution are determined by which mutations occur and fix. In rapidly adapting microbial populations, this process is particularly hard to predict because lineages with different beneficial mutations often spread…
We have analyzed DNA sequences of known genes from 16 yeast chromosomes (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) in terms of oligonucleotides. We have noticed that the relative abundances of oligonucleotide usage in the genome follow a long-tail…
Gene expression is a complex and quantitative trait that is influenced by both genetic and non-genetic regulators including environmental factors. Evaluating the contribution of environment to gene expression regulation and identifying…
Epigenetic observations are represented by the total number of reads from a given pool of cells and the number of methylated reads, making it reasonable to model this data by a binomial distribution. There are numerous factors that can…
Recurrent mutations are a common phenomenon in population genetics. They may be at the origin of the fixation of a new genotype, if they give a phenotypic advantage to the carriers of the new mutation. In this paper, we are interested in…
Between-species coevolution, and in particular antagonistic host-parasite coevolution, is a major process shaping within-species diversity. In this paper we investigate the role of various stochastic processes affecting the outcome of the…
Despite recent advances in our ability to detect adaptive evolution involving the cis-regulation of gene expression, our knowledge of the molecular mechanisms underlying these adaptations has lagged far behind. Across all model organisms…
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…
Many DNA sequence variants influence phenotypes by altering gene expression. Our understanding of these variants is limited by sample sizes of current studies and by measurements of mRNA rather than protein abundance. We developed a…
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…