Related papers: Inferring selective constraint from population gen…
Identifying the complete set of functional elements within the human genome would be a windfall for multiple areas of biological research including medicine, molecular biology, and evolution. Complete knowledge of function would aid in the…
Ward and Kellis (Reports, September 5 2012) identify regulatory regions in the human genome exhibiting lineage-specific constraint and estimate the extent of purifying selection. There is no statistical rationale for the examples they…
Identifying drivers of complex traits from the noisy signals of genetic variation obtained from high throughput genome sequencing technologies is a central challenge faced by human geneticists today. We hypothesize that the variants…
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…
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…
Gene regulation is a complex process involving the role of several genomic elements which work in concert to drive spatio-temporal expression. The experimental characterization of gene regulatory elements is a very complex and…
Human populations have experienced dramatic growth since the Neolithic revolution. Recent studies that sequenced a very large number of individuals observed an extreme excess of rare variants, and provided clear evidence of recent rapid…
Genetic algorithms are heuristic optimization techniques inspired by Darwinian evolution, which are characterized by successfully finding robust solutions for optimization problems. Here, we propose a subroutine-based quantum genetic…
Gene set enrichment analyses of 8,405 genes linked with 35,074 human-specific (hs) regulatory single-nucleotide changes (SNCs) revealed the staggering breadth of significant associations with morphological structures, physiological…
To characterize natural selection, various analytical methods for detecting candidate genomic regions have been developed. We propose to perform genome-wide scans of natural selection using principal component analysis. We show that the…
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…
Understanding functional organization of genetic information is a major challenge in modern biology. Following the initial publication of the human genome sequence in 2001, advances in high-throughput measurement technologies and efficient…
Non-invasive measurements of the human brain using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have significantly improved our understanding the brain's network organization by enabling measurement of anatomical connections between brain regions…
Understanding the fundamentals of human reasoning is central to the development of any system built to closely interact with humans. Cognitive science pursues the goal of modeling human-like intelligence from a theory-driven perspective…
Thousands of candidate human-specific regulatory sequences (HSRS) have been identified, supporting the hypothesis that unique to human phenotypes result from human-specific alterations of genomic regulatory networks. Here, conservation…
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…
There are many instances in genetics in which we wish to determine whether two candidate populations are distinguishable on the basis of their genetic structure. Examples include populations which are geographically separated, case--control…
Recent studies have shown that human populations have experienced a complex demographic history, including a recent epoch of rapid population growth that led to an excess in the proportion of rare genetic variants in humans today. This…
Resource constrained job scheduling is a hard combinatorial optimisation problem that originates in the mining industry. Off-the-shelf solvers cannot solve this problem satisfactorily in reasonable timeframes, while other solution methods…
Compared to a neutral model, purifying selection distorts the structure of genealogies and hence alters the patterns of sampled genetic variation. Although these distortions may be common in nature, our understanding of how we expect…