Related papers: The pattern and distribution of deleterious mutati…
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…
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…
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…
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…
A strong demographic Allee effect in which the expected population growth rate is negative below a certain critical population size can cause high extinction probabilities in small introduced populations. However, many species are…
The evolution of complex molecular traits such as disulphide bridges often requires multiple mutations. The intermediate steps in such evolutionary trajectories are likely to be selectively neutral or deleterious. Therefore, large…
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…
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…
Weak purifying selection, acting on many linked mutations, may play a major role in shaping patterns of molecular evolution in natural populations. Yet efforts to infer these effects from DNA sequence data are limited by our incomplete…
Ecological selection is a major driver of community assembly. Selection is classified as stabilizing when species with intermediate trait values gain the highest reproductive success, whereas selection is considered directional when fitness…
Evolution on neutral networks of genotypes has been found in models to concentrate on genotypes with high mutational robustness, to a degree determined by the topology of the network. Here analysis is generalized beyond neutral networks to…
Intraspecific trait variation has been increasingly recognized as an important factor in determining species interaction and diversity. Eco-evolutionary models have studied the distribution of trait values within a population that changes…
Some species exhibit very high levels of DNA sequence variability; there is also evidence for the existence of heritable epigenetic variants that experience state changes at a much higher rate than sequence variants. In both cases, the…
The accumulation of deleterious mutations is driven by rare fluctuations which lead to the loss of all mutation free individuals, a process known as Muller's ratchet. Even though Muller's ratchet is a paradigmatic process in population…
The evolutionary significance of hybridization and subsequent introgression has long been appreciated, but evaluation of the genome-wide effects of these phenomena has only recently become possible. Crop-wild study systems represent ideal…
Cryptic genetic sequences have attenuated effects on phenotypes. In the classic view, relaxed selection allows cryptic genetic diversity to build up across individuals in a population, providing alleles that may later contribute to…
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…
When predicting the fate and consequences of recurring deleterious mutations in self-fertilising populations most models developed make the assumption that populations have discrete non-overlapping generations. This makes them biologically…
Selective sweeps are typically associated with a local reduction of genetic diversity around the adaptive site. However, selective sweeps can also quickly carry neutral mutations to observable population frequencies if they arise early in a…
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…