Related papers: Synonymous mutations reduce genome compactness in …
Messenger RNA encodes a sequence of amino acids by using codons. For most amino acids there are multiple synonymous codons that can encode the amino acid. The translation speed can vary from one codon to another, thus there is room for…
GC-content, the ratio of guanine and cytosine bases in an entire nucleotide sequence, and palindromic sequences are unique for every organism due to genomic evolution. The goals of our research was to establish a correlation between…
Intrapatient HIV-1 evolution is dominated by selection on the protein level in the arms race with the adaptive immune system. When cytotoxic CD8+ T-cells or neutralizing antibodies target a new epitope, the virus often escapes via…
Viruses can amplify their genomes following different replication modes (RMs) ranging from the stamping machine replication (SMR) model to the geometric replication (GR) model. Different RMs are expected to produce different evolutionary…
Genetic robustness, the preservation of an optimal phenotype in the face of mutations, is critical to the understanding of evolution as phenotypically expressed genetic variation is the fuel of natural selection. The origin of genetic…
Synonymous sites are generally assumed to be subject to weak selective constraint. For this reason, they are often neglected as a possible source of important functional variation. We use site frequency spectra from deep population…
Very low levels of genetic diversity have been reported in vertebrates with large genomes, notably salamanders and lungfish [1-3]. Interpreting differences in heterozygosity, which reflects genetic diversity in a population, is complicated…
Many simple RNA viruses enclose their genetic material by a protein shell called the capsid. While the capsid structures are well characterized for most viruses, the structure of RNA inside the shells and the factors contributing to it…
Textual analysis of typical microbial genomes reveals that they have the statistical characteristics of a DNA sequence of a much shorter length. This peculiar property supports an evolutionary model in which a genome evolves by random…
The formation of a viral capsid -- the highly-ordered protein shell that surrounds the genome of a virus -- is the canonical example of self-assembly. The capsids of many positive-sense RNA viruses spontaneously assemble from in vitro…
The problem of RNA genomes packaged inside spherical viruses is studied. The viral capsid is modeled as a hollowed sphere. The attraction between RNA molecules and the inner viral capsid is assumed to be non-specific and occurs at the inner…
The packaging of genetic material within a protein shell, called the capsid, marks a pivotal step in the life cycle of numerous single-stranded RNA viruses. Understanding how hundreds, or even thousands, of proteins assemble around the…
Replication of single-stranded RNA virus can be complicated, compared to that of double-stranded virus, as it require production of intermediate antigenomic strands that then serve as template for the genomic-sense strands. Moreover, for…
Simple RNA viruses efficiently encapsulate their genome into a nano-sized protein shell: the capsid. Spontaneous co-assembly of the genome and the capsid proteins is driven predominantly by electrostatic interactions between the negatively…
HIV-1, an enveloped RNA virus, produces viral particles that are known to be much more heterogeneous in size than is typical of non-enveloped viruses. We present here a novel strategy to study HIV-1 Viral Like Particles (VLP) assembly by…
BACKGROUND: An important question is whether evolution favors properties such as mutational robustness or evolvability that do not directly benefit any individual, but can influence the course of future evolution. Functionally similar…
The evolution of drug resistance in HIV occurs by the fixation of specific, well-known, drug-resistance mutations, but the underlying population genetic processes are not well understood. By analyzing within-patient longitudinal sequence…
In evolution, the effects of a single deleterious mutation can sometimes be compensated for by a second mutation which recovers the original phenotype. Such epistatic interactions have implications for the structure of genome space -…
We showed in this paper that similarity network can be used as an powerful tools to study the relationship of tRNA genes. We constructed a network of 3719 tRNA gene sequences using simplest alignment and studied its topology, degree…
Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) often appear in clusters along the length of a chromosome. This is due to variation in local coalescent times caused by,for example, selection or recombination. Here we investigate whether…