Related papers: The pattern and distribution of deleterious mutati…
The evolution of species habitat range is an important topic over a wide range of research fields. In higher organisms, habitat range evolution is generally associated with genetic events such as gene duplication. However, the specific…
Population genomic studies have shown that genetic draft and background selection can profoundly affect the genome-wide patterns of molecular variation. We performed forward simulations under realistic gene-structure and selection scenarios…
Deep neural networks (DNN) have been used successfully in many scientific problems for their high prediction accuracy, but their application to genetic studies remains challenging due to their poor interpretability. In this paper, we…
Mendelian randomization uses genetic variants to make causal inferences about the effect of a risk factor on an outcome. With fine-mapped genetic data, there may be hundreds of genetic variants in a single gene region any of which could be…
We introduce a multi-allele Wright-Fisher model with non-recurrent, reversible mutation and directional selection. In this setting, the allele frequencies at a single locus track the path of a hybrid jump-diffusion process with state space…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…
Social networks exhibit strikingly systematic patterns across a wide range of human contexts. While genetic variation accounts for a significant portion of the variation in many complex social behaviors, the heritability of egocentric…
The fitness contribution of an allele at one genetic site may depend on alleles at other sites, a phenomenon known as epistasis. Epistasis can profoundly influence the process of evolution in populations under selection, and can shape the…
Robustness to mutations and noise has been shown to evolve through stabilizing selection for optimal phenotypes in model gene regulatory networks. The ability to evolve robust mutants is known to depend on the network architecture. How do…
GWAS in humans are revealing the genetic architecture of biomedical and anthropomorphic traits, i.e., the frequencies and effect sizes of variants that contribute to heritable variation in a trait. To interpret these findings, we need to…
Theory predicts rapid genetic drift during invasions, yet many expanding populations maintain high genetic diversity. We find that genetic drift is dramatically suppressed when dispersal rates increase with the population density because…
The existence of complex (multiple-step) genetic adaptations that are "irreducible" (i.e., all partial combinations are less fit than the original genotype) is one of the longest standing problems in evolutionary biology. In standard…
Background: Diversity estimates in cultivated plants provide a rationale for conservation strategies and support the selection of starting material for breeding programs. Diversity measures applied to crops usually have been limited to the…
Large sets of genotypes give rise to the same phenotype because phenotypic expression is highly redundant. Accordingly, a population can accept mutations without altering its phenotype, as long as thegenotype mutates into another one on the…
Populations of widely distributed species often encounter and adapt to specific environmental conditions. However, comprehensive characterization of the genetic basis of adaptation is demanding, requiring genome-wide genotype data, multiple…
We investigate through numerical simulations the effect of selection on two summary statistics for nucleotide variation in a sample of two genes from a population of N asexually reproducing haploid individuals. One is the mean time since…
Intragenomic recombination (crossover) is a very important evolutionary mechanism. The crossover events are not evenly distributed along the natural chromosomes. Monte Carlo simulations revealed that frequency of recombinations decides…
Modelling genetic phenomena affecting biological traits is important for the development of agriculture as it allows breeders to predict the potential of breeding for certain traits. One such phenomenon is heterosis or hybrid vigor:…
Horizontal transfer (HT) of heritable information or `traits' (carried by genetic elements, endosymbionts, or culture) is widespread among living organisms. Yet current ecological and evolutionary theory addressing HT is limited. We present…
Evolutionary analyses of large populations commonly incorporate stochasticity through temporal variation in selection while treating genetic transmission as fixed. Much less attention has been given to stochasticity in transmission itself.…