Related papers: The deleterious mutation load is insensitive to re…

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…

We examine the dynamics of an age-structured population model in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of the parent. While the total population of the system always reaches a steady state, the…

When studying a national-level population, demographers can safely ignore the effect of individual-level randomness on age-sex structure. When studying a single community, or group of communities, however, the potential importance of…

When beneficial mutations are rare, they accumulate by a series of selective sweeps. But when they are common, many beneficial mutations will occur before any can fix, so there will be many different mutant lineages in the population…

We consider the accumulation of beneficial and deleterious mutations in large asexual populations. The rate of adaptation is affected by the total mutation rate, proportion of beneficial mutations and population size $N$. We show that…

Despite increasing data from population-wide sequencing studies, the risk for recessive disorders in consanguineous partnerships is still heavily debated. An important aspect that has not sufficiently been investigated theoretically, is the…

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…

Cancer progression is driven by a small number of genetic alterations accumulating in a neoplasm. These few driver alterations reside in a cancer genome alongside tens of thousands of other mutations that are widely believed to have no role…

Deleterious genetic variants can be evaluated as quantitative traits using information theory-based sequence analysis of recognition sites. To assess the effect of such variants, fitness and genetic load of SNPs which alter binding site…

We analyse numerically the effects of small population size in the initial transient regime of a simple example population dynamics. These effects play an important role for the numerical determination of large deviation functions of…

The drift-barrier hypothesis states that random genetic drift constrains the refinement of a phenotype under natural selection. The influence of effective population size and the genome-wide deleterious mutation rate were studied…

Pervasive natural selection can strongly influence observed patterns of genetic variation, but these effects remain poorly understood when multiple selected variants segregate in nearby regions of the genome. Classical population genetics…

Conventional population genetics considers the evolution of a limited number of genotypes corresponding to phenotypes with different fitness. As model phenotypes, in particular RNA secondary structure, have become computationally tractable,…

We have investigated the role that the mutation rate and the structure of genetic variation at a locus play in determining whether a gene is involved in disease. We predict that the mutation rate and its genetic diversity should be higher…

Human population is at the centre of research on global environmental change. On the one hand, population dynamics influence the environment and the global climate system through consumption-based carbon emissions. On the other hand, health…

Muller's ratchet describes the irreversible accumulation of deleterious mutations in asexual populations. In well-mixed populations the speed of fitness decline is exponentially small in the population size, and any positive rate of…

Human populations have a complex history of introgression and of changing population size. Human genetic variation has been affected by both these processes, so that inference of past population size depends upon the pattern of gene flow…

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…

Demographic stochasticity is important in determining extinction risks of small populations, but it is largely unknown how its effect depends on the life histories of species. We modeled effects of demographic stochasticity on extinction…

We consider neutral evolution of a large population subject to changes in its population size. For a population with a time-variable carrying capacity we have computed the distributions of the total branch lengths of its sample genealogies.…