Related papers: Stability and response of polygenic traits to stab…

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…

Although many phenotypic traits are determined by a large number of genetic variants, the behavior of allele frequencies in a polygenic trait is not completely understood. The problem is especially challenging when the quantitative trait of…

Although a number of studies have shown that natural and laboratory populations initially well-adapted to their environment can evolve rapidly when conditions suddenly change, the dynamics of rapid adaptation are not well understood. Here a…

By exploiting an analogy between population genetics and statistical mechanics, we study the evolution of a polygenic trait under stabilizing selection, mutation, and genetic drift. This requires us to track only four macroscopic variables,…

Although many phenotypic traits are determined by a large number of genetic variants, how a polygenic trait adapts in response to the changes in the environment is still poorly understood. Here we study the adaptation dynamics of a…

Adaptation in response to selection on polygenic phenotypes may occur via subtle allele frequencies shifts at many loci. Current population genomic techniques are not well posed to identify such signals. In the past decade, detailed…

In large populations, multiple beneficial mutations may be simultaneously spreading. In asexual populations, these mutations must either arise on the same background or compete against each other. In sexual populations, recombination can…

Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…

The common understanding of protein evolution has been that neutral or slightly deleterious mutations are fixed by random drift, and evolutionary rate is determined primarily by the proportion of neutral mutations. However, recent studies…

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…

Genetic diversity is central to the process of evolution. Both natural selection and random genetic drift are influenced by the level of genetic diversity of a population; selection acts on diversity while drift samples from it. At a given…

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…

We study the population genetics of Evolution in the important special case of weak selection, in which all fitness values are assumed to be close to one another. We show that in this regime natural selection is tantamount to the…

Selection, mutation and random drift affect the dynamics of allele frequencies and consequently of quantitative traits. While the macroscopic dynamics of quantitative traits can be measured, the underlying allele frequencies are typically…

When mutation rates are low, natural selection remains effective, and increasing the mutation rate can give rise to an increase in adaptation rate. When mutation rates are high to begin with, however, increasing the mutation rate may have a…

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…

In considering evolution of transcribed regions, regulatory modules, and other genomic loci of interest, we are often faced with a situation in which the number of allelic states greatly exceeds the population size. In this limit, the…

We show how concepts from statistical physics, such as order parameter, thermodynamic limit, and quantum phase transition, translate into biological concepts in mutation-selection models for sequence evolution and can be used there. The…

Genetically identical cells in the same population can take on phenotypically variable states, leading to differentiated responses to external signals, such as nutrients and drug-induced stress. Many models and experiments have focused on a…

We study the evolution of allele frequencies in a large population where random mating is violated in a particular way that is related to recent works on speciation. Specifically, we consider non-random encounters in haploid organisms…