Related papers: Scaling properties of evolutionary paths in a biop…
It has recently been discovered that many biological systems, when represented as graphs, exhibit a scale-free topology. One such system is the set of structural relationships among protein domains. The scale-free nature of this and other…
One of the classical questions in evolutionary biology is how evolutionary processes are coupled at the gene and species level. With this motivation, we compare the topological properties (mainly the depth scaling, as a characterization of…
Proteins evolve through complex sequence spaces, with fitness landscapes serving as a conceptual framework that links sequence to function. Fitness landscapes can be smooth, where multiple similarly accessible evolutionary paths are…
The tempo and mode of an adaptive process is strongly determined by the structure of the fitness landscape that underlies it. In order to be able to predict evolutionary outcomes (even on the short term), we must know more about the nature…
Random walks on multidimensional nonlinear landscapes are of interest in many areas of science and engineering. In particular, properties of adaptive trajectories on fitness landscapes determine population fates and thus play a central role…
Protein folding and design are major biophysical problems, the solution of which would lead to important applications especially in medicine. Here a novel protein model capable of simultaneously provide quantitative protein design and…
Proteins, essential to biological systems, perform functions intricately linked to their three-dimensional structures. Understanding the relationship between protein structures and their amino acid sequences remains a core challenge in…
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…
Geometric constraints impact the formation of a broad range of spatial networks, from amino acid chains folding to proteins structures to rearranging particle aggregates. How the network of interactions dynamically self-organizes in such…
Evolutionary adaptation is the process that increases the fit of a population to the fitness landscape it inhabits. As a consequence, evolutionary dynamics is shaped, constrained, and channeled, by that fitness landscape. Much work has been…
Relationships between sediment flux and geomorphic processes are combined with statements of mass conservation, in order to create continuum models of hillslope evolution. These models have parameters which can be calibrated using available…
Proteins populate a manifold in the high-dimensional sequence space whose geometrical structure guides their natural evolution. Leveraging recently-developed structure prediction tools based on transformer models, we first examine the…
Experimental studies on enzyme evolution show that only a small fraction of all possible mutation trajectories are accessible to evolution. However, these experiments deal with individual enzymes and explore a tiny part of the fitness…
The mechanisms by which a protein's 3D structure can be determined based on its amino acid sequence have long been one of the key mysteries of biophysics. Often simplistic models, such as those derived from geometric constraints, capture…
Coarse-grained models have played an important role in the study of the behavior of DNA at length scales beyond a few hundred base pairs. Traditionally, these models have relied on structurally featureless and sequence-independent…
Protein sequences serve as a natural record of the evolutionary constraints that shape their functional structures. We show that it is possible to use only sequence information to go beyond predicting native structures and global stability…
Recently described stochastic models of protein evolution have demonstrated that the inclusion of structural information in addition to amino acid sequences leads to a more reliable estimation of evolutionary parameters. We present a…
The protein folding problem must ultimately be solved on all length scales from the atomic up through a hierarchy of complicated structures. By analyzing the stability of the folding process using physics and mathematics, this paper shows…
Despite the significant increase in computational power, molecular modeling of protein structure using classical all-atom approaches remains inefficient, at least for most of the protein targets in the focus of biomedical research. Perhaps…
The coding space of protein sequences is shaped by evolutionary constraints set by requirements of function and stability. We show that the coding space of a given protein family--the total number of sequences in that family--can be…