Related papers: Positive selection drives faster-Z evolution in si…
During chronic infection, HIV-1 engages in a rapid coevolutionary arms race with the host's adaptive immune system. While it is clear that HIV exerts strong selection on the adaptive immune system, the characteristics of the somatic…
The effect of phenotypic plasticity on evolution, the so-called Baldwin effect, has been studied extensively for more than 100 years. Plasticity is known to influence the speed of evolution towards a specific genetic configuration, but…
Computer experiments that mirror the evolutionary dynamics of sexual and asexual organisms as they occur in nature, tested features proposed to explain the evolution of sexual recombination. Results show that this evolution is better…
Current models of animal evolution focus on selection of individuals, ignoring the much faster selection of symbiotic bacteria. Here we take host-symbiont interactions into account by introducing a Population Genetics-like model of…
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…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
Massive galaxies at high-z have smaller effective radii than those today, but similar central densities. Their size growth therefore relates primarily to the evolving abundance of low-density material. Various models have been proposed to…
Experimental data that prove the existence of the zygotic combinatorial process occurring in an embryogenesis-entering zygote are presented in the paper. The zygotic combinatorial process is found when analyzing F1 hybrid plants obtained…
The Hybrid Genetic Optimisation framework (HYGO) is introduced to meet the pressing need for efficient and unified optimisation frameworks that support both parametric and functional learning in complex engineering problems. Evolutionary…
Genetic algorithms have been used in recent decades to solve a broad variety of search problems. These algorithms simulate natural selection to explore a parameter space in search of solutions for a broad variety of problems. In this paper,…
Several studies question the adaptive value of female preferences for older males. Theory and evidence show that older males carry more deleterious mutations in their sperm than younger males carry. These mutations are not visible to…
When a problem instance is perturbed by a small modification, one would hope to find a good solution for the new instance by building on a known good solution for the previous one. Via a rigorous mathematical analysis, we show that…
Estimates of the fraction of nucleotide substitutions driven by positive selection vary widely across different species. Accounting for different estimates of positive selection has been difficult, in part because selection on polymorphism…
Positive selection distorts the structure of genealogies and hence alters patterns of genetic variation within a population. Most analyses of these distortions focus on the signatures of hitchhiking due to hard or soft selective sweeps at a…
We study a stochastic spatial model of biological competition in which two species have the same birth and death rates, but different diffusion constants. In the absence of this difference, the model can be considered as an off-lattice…
In this study we analyze the evolution of the effective reproduction number, $R$, through a SIR spreading process in heterogeneous networks; Characterizing its decay process allows to analytically study the effects of countermeasures on the…
Mutation rate is a key determinant of the pace as well as outcome of evolution, and variability in this rate has been shown in different scenarios to play a key role in evolutionary adaptation and resistance evolution under stress caused by…
The human Y chromosome exhibits surprisingly low levels of genetic diversity. This could result from neutral processes if the effective population size of males is reduced relative to females due to a higher variance in the number of…
Very low levels of genetic diversity have been reported in vertebrates with large genomes, notably salamanders and lungfish [1-3]. Interpreting differences in heterozygosity, which reflects genetic diversity in a population, is complicated…