Related papers: Recombination and peak jumping
Identifying and quantifying the benefits of sex and recombination is a long standing problem in evolutionary theory. In particular, contradictory claims have been made about the existence of a benefit of recombination on high dimensional…
Mutational robustness quantifies the effect of random mutations on fitness. When mutational robustness is high, most mutations do not change fitness or have only a minor effect on it. From the point of view of fitness landscapes, robust…
In evolution theory the concept of a fitness landscape has played an important role, evolution itself being portrayed as a hill-climbing process on a rugged landscape. In this article it is shown that in general, in the presence of other…
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…
The evolutionary effect of recombination depends crucially on the epistatic interactions between linked loci. A paradigmatic case where recombination is known to be strongly disadvantageous is a two-locus fitness landscape dis- playing…
Homologous recombination is an important operator in the evolution of biological organisms. However, there is still no clear, generally accepted understanding of why it exists and under what circumstances it is useful. In this paper we…
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,…
Maintenance of sexual reproduction and genetic recombination imposes physiological costs when compared to parthenogenic reproduction, most prominently: for maintaining the corresponding (molecular) machinery, for finding a mating partner,…
Darwinian evolution is driven by random mutations, genetic recombination (gene shuffling) and selection that favors genotypes with high fitness. For systems where each genotype can be represented as a bitstring of length $L$, an overview of…
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 process of genetic recombination can be seen as a chemical reaction network with mass-action kinetics. We review the known results on existence, uniqueness, and global stability of an equilibrium in every compatibility class and for all…
Epistatic interactions between mutations add substantial complexity to adaptive landscapes, and are often thought of as detrimental to our ability to predict evolution. Yet, patterns of global epistasis, in which the fitness effect of a…
We study the role of recombination, as practiced by genetically-competent bacteria, in speeding up Darwinian evolution. This is done by adding a new process to a previously-studied Markov model of evolution on a smooth fitness landscape;…
Biochemical and regulatory interactions central to biological networks are expected to cause extensive genetic interactions or epistasis affecting the heritability of complex traits and the distribution of genotypes in populations. However,…
In epistatic fitness landscapes, the fitness effect of a mutation depends on the genetic background and may even switch between deleterious and beneficial depending on the presence of another mutation. Epistatic interactions may cause both…
We study the evolution of recombination using a microscopic model developed within the frame of the theory of quantitative traits. Two components of fitness are considered: a static one that describes adaptation to environmental factors not…
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…
The nature of epistasis has important consequences for the evolutionary significance of sex and recombination. Recent efforts to find negative epistasis as source of negative linkage disequilibrium and associated long-term sex advantage…
Evolution and learning are two of the fundamental mechanisms by which life adapts in order to survive and to transcend limitations. These biological phenomena inspired successful computational methods such as evolutionary algorithms and…
The effect of genetic operators other than selection, such as mutation and recombination, on the genotype-phenotype map is considered. In particular, when the genotypic fitness landscape exhibits a ``symmetry'', i.e. many genotypes…