Related papers: The pattern and distribution of deleterious mutati…
Recent studies have shown that single-stranded viral RNAs fold into more compact structures than random RNA sequences with similar chemical composition and identical length. Based on this comparison it has been suggested that wild-type…
The emerging field of high-throughput compartmentalized in vitro evolution is a promising new approach to protein engineering. In these experiments, libraries of mutant genotypes are randomly distributed and expressed in microscopic…
Stronger selection implies faster evolution---that is, the greater the force, the faster the change. This apparently self-evident proposition, however, is derived under the assumption that genetic variation within a population is primarily…
We investigate the relationship between the average fitness decay due to single mutations and the strength of epistatic interactions in genetic sequences. We observe that epistatic interactions between mutations are correlated to the…
A steady influx of a single deleterious multilocus genotype will impose genetic load on the resident population and leave multiple descendants carrying various numbers of the foreign alleles. Provided that the foreign types are rare at…
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…
Antibodies, an essential part of our immune system, develop through an intricate process to bind a wide array of pathogens. This process involves randomly mutating DNA sequences encoding these antibodies to find variants with improved…
Consider a genetic locus carrying a strongly beneficial allele which has recently fixed in a large population. As strongly beneficial alleles fix quickly, sequence diversity at partially linked neutral loci is reduced. This phenomenon is…
Natural selection explains how life has evolved over millions of years from more primitive forms. The speed at which this happens, however, has sometimes defied formal explanations when based on random (uniformly distributed) mutations.…
The behavior of the Poisson-Dirichlet distribution with small mutation rate is studied through large deviations. The structure of the rate function indicates that the number of alleles is finite at the instant when mutation appears. The…
Current theories about mechanisms promoting species co-existence in diverse communities assume that species only interact ecologically. Species are treated as discrete evolutionary entities, even though abundant empirical evidence indicates…
The spread of synthetic gene drives is often discussed in the context of panmictic populations connected by gene flow and described with simple deterministic models. Under such assumptions, an entire species could be altered by releasing a…
Natural selection at one site shapes patterns of genetic variation at linked sites. Quantifying the effects of 'linked selection' on levels of genetic diversity is key to making reliable inference about demography, building a null model in…
The standard genetic code is known to be robust to translation errors and point mutations. We studied how small modifications of the standard code affect its robustness. The robustness was assessed in terms of a proper stability function,…
The population structure often impacts evolutionary dynamics. In constant-selection evolutionary dynamics between two types, amplifiers of selection are networks that promote the fitter mutant to take over the entire population, and…
Whether evolution can be predicted is a key question in evolutionary biology. Here we set out to better understand the repeatability of evolution. We explored experimentally the effect of mutation supply and the strength of selective…
Robustness to genetic or environmental disturbances is often considered as a key property of living systems. Yet, in spite of being discussed since the 1950s, how robustness emerges from the complexity of genetic architectures and how it…
This paper examines the effect of mimicking discontinuous heredity caused by carrying more than one chromosome in some living organisms cells in Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization algorithms. In this representation, the phenotype may…
Stochastic phenotype switching has been suggested to play a beneficial role in microbial populations by leading to the division of labour among cells, or ensuring that at least some of the population survives an unexpected change in…
Two important problems affect the ability of asexual populations to accumulate beneficial mutations, and hence to adapt. First, clonal interference causes some beneficial mutations to be outcompeted by more-fit mutations which occur in the…