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A haplotype block, or simply a block, is a chromosomal segment, DNA base sequence or string that occurs in only a few variants or types in the genomes of a population of interest, and that has an encapsulated or 'private' frequency…
Resistance to chemotherapies, particularly to anticancer treatments, is an increasing medical concern. Among the many mechanisms at work in cancers, one of the most important is the selection of tumor cells expressing resistance genes or…
Measuring natural selection on genomic elements involved in the cis-regulation of gene expression -- such as transcriptional enhancers and promoters -- is critical for understanding the evolution of genomes, yet it remains a major…
Coalescent processes, including mutation, are derived from Moran type population models admitting large offspring numbers. Including mutation in the coalescent process allows for quantifying the turnover of alleles by computing the…
How robust is the natural genetic code with respect to mistranslation errors? It has long been known that the genetic code is very efficient in limiting the effect of point mutation. A misread codon will commonly code either for the same…
We investigate the process of fixation of advantageous mutations in an asexual population. We assume that the effect of each beneficial mutation is exponentially distributed with mean value $\omega_{med}=1/\beta$. The model also considers…
The emergence of a predominant phenotype within a cell population is often triggered by a rare accumulation of DNA mutations in a single cell. For example, tumors may be initiated by a single cell in which multiple mutations cooperate to…
The introduction and persistence of novel sexually antagonistic alleles can depend upon factors that differ between males and females. Understanding the conditions for invasion in a two-locus model can elucidate these processes. For…
We revisit the classical population genetics model of a population evolving under multiplicative selection, mutation and drift. The number of beneficial alleles in a multi-locus system can be considered a trait under exponential selection.…
The behavior of the Poisson-Dirichlet distribution with small mutation rate is studied through large deviations. The structure of the rate function indicates that the number of alleles is finite at the instant when mutation appears. The…
We have used the sexual Penna ageing model to show that the relation between dominance and recessiveness could be a force which optimizes the genome size. While the possibility of complementation of the damaged allele by its functional…
The short time behavior of nucleation probabilities is studied by representing nucleation as diffusion in a potential well with escape over a barrier. If initially all growing nuclei start at the bottom of the well, the first nucleation…
Consider a branching process with a homogeneous reproduction law. Sampling a single cell uniformly from the population at a time $T > 0$ and looking along the sampled cell's ancestral lineage, we find that the reproduction law is…
Cultural traits such as words, names, decorative styles, and technical standards often assume arbitrary values and are thought to evolve neutrally. But neutral evolution cannot explain why some traits come and go in cycles of popularity…
The complicated, evolving landscape of cancer mutations poses a formidable challenge to identify cancer genes among the large lists of mutations typically generated in NGS experiments. The ability to prioritize these variants is therefore…
The nature of the quantitative distribution of the 64 DNA codons in the human genome has been an issue of debate for over a decade. Some groups have proposed that the quantitative distribution of the DNA codons ordered as a rank-frequency…
Weak purifying selection, acting on many linked mutations, may play a major role in shaping patterns of molecular evolution in natural populations. Yet efforts to infer these effects from DNA sequence data are limited by our incomplete…
We consider the evolution of populations under the joint action of mutation and differential reproduction, or selection. The population is modelled as a finite-type Markov branching process in continuous time, and the associated…
Objectives: In this study, we quantify the growth variability of tumour cell clones from a human leukemia cell line. Materials and methods: We have used microplate spectrophotometry to measure the growth kinetics of hundreds of individual…
Transcription commonly occurs in bursts, with alternating productive (ON) and quiescent (OFF) periods, governing mRNA production rates. Yet, how transcription is regulated through bursting dynamics remains unresolved. Here, we conduct…