Related papers: The pattern and distribution of deleterious mutati…
A key question in the current diversity crisis is how diversity has been maintained throughout evolution and how to preserve it. Modern coexistence theories suggest that a high invasion rate of rare new types is directly related to…
Because mutations are mostly deleterious, mutation rates should be reduced by natural selection. However, mutations also provide the raw material for adaptation. Therefore, evolutionary theory suggests that the mutation rate must balance…
Genotype-phenotype (GP) maps specify how the random mutations that change genotypes generate variation by altering phenotypes, which, in turn, can trigger selection. Many GP maps share the following general properties: 1) The number of…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
Horizontal gene transfer consists in exchanging genetic materials between microorganisms during their lives. This is a major mechanism of bacterial evolution and is believed to be of main importance in antibiotics resistance. We consider a…
About 2% of human genetic polymorphisms have been hypothesized to arise via multinucleotide mutations (MNMs), complex events that generate SNPs at multiple sites in a single generation. MNMs have the potential to accelerate the pace at…
The entanglement of population dynamics, evolution, and adaptive radiation for species competing for resources is studied. For resource harvesting, we modify the model used in Ref. Phys. Rev. Lett. 118 048103 and introduce new resource…
Population genetics models typically consider a fixed population size and a unique selection coefficient. However, population dynamics inherently generate noise in numbers of individuals and selection acts on various components of the…
Epistasis refers to the phenomenon in which phenotypic consequences caused by mutation of one gene depend on one or more mutations at another gene. Epistasis is critical for understanding many genetic and evolutionary processes, including…
Background: Trace quantities of contaminating DNA are widespread in the laboratory environment, but their presence has received little attention in the context of high throughput sequencing. This issue is highlighted by recent works that…
Mutational robustness quantifies the effect of random mutations on fitness. When mutational robustness is high, most mutations do not change fitness or have only a minor effect on it. From the point of view of fitness landscapes, robust…
The origin of altruistic behavior, i.e. the behavior that is useful for a population or a species but goes at the expense of an altruistic individual, has long been a challenge for students of evolutionary biology. The populations with…
Splicing sites provide unique statistics in human genome due to their large number and reasonably complete annotation. Analyses of the cumulative SNPs distribution in splicing sites reveal a few interesting observations. While a degree of…
In evolution, the effects of a single deleterious mutation can sometimes be compensated for by a second mutation which recovers the original phenotype. Such epistatic interactions have implications for the structure of genome space -…
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations cause severe congenital diseases but may also be associated with healthy aging. MtDNA is stochastically replicated and degraded, and exists within organelles which undergo dynamic fusion and fission. The…
A selective sweep describes the reduction of diversity due to strong positive selection. If the mutation rate to a selectively beneficial allele is sufficiently high, Pennings and Hermisson (2006a) have shown, that it becomes likely, that a…
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…
Mutations are typically classified by their effects on the nucleotide sequence and by their size. Here, we argue that if our main aim is to understand the effect of mutations on evolutionary outcomes (such as adaptation or speciation), we…
We study a family of selection-mutation models of a sexual population structured by a phenotypical trait. The main feature of these models is the asymmetric trait heredity or fecundity between the parents : we assume that each individual…
The role of the selection pressure and mutation amplitude on the behavior of a single-species population evolving on a two-dimensional lattice, in a periodically changing environment, is studied both analytically and numerically. The…