Related papers: Epigenetics: What it is about?

Network biology is an interdisciplinary field bridging computational and biological sciences that has proved pivotal in advancing the understanding of cellular functions and diseases across biological systems and scales. Although the field…

Genomic alterations lead to cancer complexity and form a major hurdle for a comprehensive understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying oncogenesis. In this review, we describe the recent advances in studying cancer-associated genes…

Recent advances in high-throughput genomics technologies have resulted in the sequencing of large numbers of (near) complete genomes. These genome sequences are being mined for important functional elements, such as genes. They are also…

This work reviews current theoretical approaches of biophysics and bioinformatics for the description of nucleosome arrangements in chromatin and transcription factor binding to nucleosomal organized DNA. The role of nucleosomes in gene…

Deep phenotyping study has become an emerging field to understand the gene function and the structure of biological networks. For the living animal C. elegans, recent advances in genome-editing tools, microfluidic devices and phenotypic…

There are two contrasting explanations of sleep: as a proximate, essential physiological function or as an adaptive state of inactivity and these hypotheses remain widely debated. To investigate the adaptive significance of sleep, we…

Researchers in the field of biocomputing have, for many years, successfully "harvested and exploited" the natural world for inspiration in developing systems that are robust, adaptable and capable of generating novel and even "creative"…

Biologists rely heavily on the language of information, coding, and transmission that is commonplace in the field of information theory as developed by Claude Shannon, but there is open debate about whether such language is anything more…

During the last two decades, ecological speciation has been a major research theme in evolutionary biology. Ecological speciation occurs when reproductive isolation between populations evolves as a result of niche differentiation.…

Genetic information and environmental factors determine the path of an individuals life and therefore, the evolution of its entire species. We have succeeded in proposing and studying a model that captures this idea. In our model, a…

Segregation is a widely recognised phenomenon with profound implications for societies worldwide. From political science and gender studies to anthropology and urban studies, it has garnered considerable attention across numerous scientific…

The controversy concerning both the definition of the species and methods for inferring the boundaries and numbers of species has occupied biologists for centuries, and the debate itself has become known as the species problem. The modern…

Phylogenetics is a branch of computational biology that studies the evolutionary relationships among biological entities. Its long history and numerous applications notwithstanding, inference of phylogenetic trees from sequence data remains…

In the past decade, advances in genome sequencing have allowed researchers to uncover the history of hybridization in diverse groups of species, including our own. Although the field has made impressive progress in documenting the extent of…

Enzymes are on the front lines of evolution. All living organisms rely on highly efficient, specific enzymes for growth, sustenance, and reproduction; and many diseases are a consequence of a mutation on an enzyme that affects its catalytic…

Models of random phylogenetic networks have been used since the inception of the field, but the introduction and rigorous study of mathematically tractable models is a much more recent topic that has gained momentum in the last 5 years.…

Over a quarter of century after the invention of genetic algorithms and miriads of their modifications, as well as successful implementations, we are still lacking many essential details of thorough analysis of it's inner working. One of…

Cellular behavior is governed by gene regulatory processes that are intrinsically dynamic and nonlinear, and are subject to non-negligible amounts of random fluctuations. Such conditions are ubiquitous in physical systems, where they have…

We review here some of the historical highlights in exploratory studies of the vertebrate embryonic structure known as the neural crest. The study of the molecular properties of the cells that it produces, their migratory capacities and…

The fitness contribution of an allele at one genetic site may depend on alleles at other sites, a phenomenon known as epistasis. Epistasis can profoundly influence the process of evolution in populations under selection, and can shape the…