Related papers: Footprints of ancient balanced polymorphisms in ge…
When biological populations expand into new territory, the evolutionary outcomes can be strongly influenced by genetic drift, the random fluctuations in allele frequencies. Meanwhile, spatial variability in the environment can also…
We study evolving genealogies, i.e. processes that take values in the space of (marked) ultra-metric measure spaces and satisfy some sort of "consistency" condition. This condition is based on the observation that the genealogical distance…
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…
Living at high-altitude is one of the most difficult challenges that humans had to cope with during their evolution. Whereas several genomic studies have revealed some of the genetic bases of adaptations in Tibetan, Andean and Ethiopian…
Large populations may contain numerous simultaneously segregating polymorphisms subject to natural selection. Since selection acts on individuals whose fitness depends on many loci, different loci affect each other's dynamics. This leads to…
We consider an infinitely large population under stabilising selection and mutation in which the allelic effects determining a polygenic trait vary between loci. We obtain analytical expressions for the stationary genetic variance as a…
A phylogeny describes the evolutionary history of an evolving population. Evolutionary search algorithms can perfectly track the ancestry of candidate solutions, illuminating a population's trajectory through the search space. However,…
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…
The usefulness of a `total-evidence' approach to human population genetics was assessed through a clustering analysis of combined genome-wide SNP datasets. The combination contained only 3146 SNPs. Detailed examination of the results…
Heterozygote disadvantage is potentially a potent driver of population genetic divergence. Also referred to as underdominance, this phenomena describes a situation where a genetic heterozygote has a lower overall fitness than either…
Background: In the marine environment, where there are few absolute physical barriers, contemporary contact between previously isolated species can occur across great distances, and in some cases, may be inter-oceanic. [..] in the minke…
Ancestral sequence reconstruction is a key task in computational biology. It consists in inferring a molecular sequence at an ancestral species of a known phylogeny, given descendant sequences at the tip of the tree. In addition to its many…
Spatially resolved genetic data is increasingly used to reconstruct the migrational history of species. To assist such inference, we study, by means of simulations and analytical methods, the dynamics of neutral gene frequencies in a…
A probabilistic reconstruction of genealogies in a polyploid population (from 2x to 4x) is investigated, by considering genetic data analyzed as the probability of allele presence in a given genotype. Based on the likelihood of all possible…
In the genomic era, the identification of gene signatures associated with disease is of significant interest. Such signatures are often used to predict clinical outcomes in new patients and aid clinical decision-making. However, recent…
Protein evolution involves mutations occurring across a wide range of time scales. In analogy with disordered systems in statistical physics, this dynamical heterogeneity suggests strong correlations between mutations happening at distinct…
Conventional population genetics considers the evolution of a limited number of genotypes corresponding to phenotypes with different fitness. As model phenotypes, in particular RNA secondary structure, have become computationally tractable,…
We study the genealogical distance of two randomly chosen individuals in a population that evolves according to a two type Moran model with mutation and selection. We prove that this distance is stochastically smaller than the corresponding…
The evolution of complex molecular traits such as disulphide bridges often requires multiple mutations. The intermediate steps in such evolutionary trajectories are likely to be selectively neutral or deleterious. Therefore, large…
Biological evolution can be conceptualized as a search process in the space of gene sequences guided by the fitness landscape, a mapping that assigns a measure of reproductive value to each genotype. Here we discuss probabilistic models of…