Related papers: Patterns of positive selection in seven ant genome…
Understanding social immunity mechanisms in ant colonies remains crucial to comprehending the evolution of defense strategies in eusocial organisms. This study assumes the absence of the role of memory in the ants' defense strategy,…
More than any other species, humans form social ties to individuals who are neither kin nor mates, and these ties tend to be with similar people. Here, we show that this similarity extends to genotypes. Across the whole genome, friends'…
Viruses evolve in the background of host immune systems that exert selective pressure and drive viral evolutionary trajectories. This interaction leads to different evolutionary patterns in antigenic space. Examples observed in nature…
Gene expression levels are important molecular quantitative traits that link genotypes to molecular functions and fitness. In Drosophila, population-genetic studies in recent years have revealed substantial adaptive evolution at the genomic…
In this study, we synthesize a novel dynamical approach for ant colonies enabling them to migrate to new nest sites in a self-organizing fashion. In other words, we realize ant colony migration as a self-organizing phenotype-level…
Statistical analysis of alignments of large numbers of protein sequences has revealed "sectors" of collectively coevolving amino acids in several protein families. Here, we show that selection acting on any functional property of a protein,…
The persistence of life requires populations to adapt at a rate commensurate with the dynamics of their environment. Successful populations that inhabit highly variable environments have evolved mechanisms to increase the likelihood of…
A model of an Ant System where ants are controlled by a spiking neural circuit and a second order pheromone mechanism in a foraging task is presented. A neural circuit is trained for individual ants and subsequently the ants are exposed to…
In Parts I and II of this series, we established isomorphisms between ant colony decision-making and two major families of ensemble learning: random forests (parallel, variance reduction) and boosting (sequential, bias reduction). Here we…
Social insect colonies and ensemble machine learning methods represent two of the most successful examples of decentralized information processing in nature and computation respectively. Here we develop a rigorous mathematical framework…
As pathogens spread in a population of hosts, immunity is built up and the pool of susceptible individuals is depleted. This generates selective pressure, to which many human RNA viruses, such as influenza virus or SARS-CoV-2, respond with…
Inferring gene interaction network from gene expression data is an important task in systems biology research. The gene interaction network, especially key interactions, plays an important role in identifying biomarkers for disease that…
Colonies of ants are systems of interacting living organisms in which interactions between individuals and their environment can produce a reliable performance of a complex tasks without the need for centralised control. Particularly…
Although ant--aphid interactions are the most typical example of mutualism between insect species, some studies suggest that ant attendance is not always advantageous for the aphids because they may pay a physiological cost. In this study,…
Insect production for food and feed presents a promising supplement to ensure food safety and address the adverse impacts of agriculture on climate and environment in the future. However, optimisation is required for insect production to…
We introduce a new model of evolution on a fitness landscape possessing a tunable degree of neutrality. The model allows us to study the general properties of molecular species undergoing neutral evolution. We find that a number of…
Since its emergence in 1968, influenza A (H3N2) has evolved extensively in genotype and antigenic phenotype. Antigenic evolution occurs in the context of a two-dimensional 'antigenic map', while genetic evolution shows a characteristic…
The idea of sensitivity in ant colony systems has been exploited in hybrid ant-based models with promising results for many combinatorial optimization problems. Heterogeneity is induced in the ant population by endowing individual ants with…
Many biological networks have to filter out useful information from a vast excess of spurious interactions. We use computational evolution to predict design features of networks processing ligand categorization. The important problem of…
Applications of ACO algorithms to obtain better solutions for combinatorial optimization problems have become very popular in recent years. In ACO algorithms, group of agents repeatedly perform well defined actions and collaborate with…