Related papers: Genetic recombination as DNA repair
Using Monte Carlo model of biological evolution we have discovered that populations can switch between two different strategies of their genomes' evolution; Darwinian purifying selection and complementing the haplotypes. The first one is…
The famous "two-fold cost of sex" is really the cost of anisogamy -- why should females mate with males who do not contribute resources to offspring, rather than isogamous partners who contribute equally? In typical anisogamous populations,…
We present a mathematical simplification for the evolutionary dynamics of a heritable trait within a two-sex population. This trait is assumed to control the timing of sex-specific life-history events, such as the age of sexual maturity and…
This work presents a population genetic model of evolution, which includes haploid selection, mutation, recombination, and drift. The mutation-selection equilibrium can be expressed exactly in closed form for arbitrary fitness functions…
We study the population genetics of Evolution in the important special case of weak selection, in which all fitness values are assumed to be close to one another. We show that in this regime natural selection is tantamount to the…
A question in evolutionary biology is why the number of males is approximately equal to that of females in many species, and Fisher's theory of equal investment answers that it is the evolutionarily stable state. The Fisherian mechanism can…
Despite increasing data from population-wide sequencing studies, the risk for recessive disorders in consanguineous partnerships is still heavily debated. An important aspect that has not sufficiently been investigated theoretically, is the…
Pervasive natural selection can strongly influence observed patterns of genetic variation, but these effects remain poorly understood when multiple selected variants segregate in nearby regions of the genome. Classical population genetics…
The genetic algorithm is an optimization procedure motivated by biological evolution and is successfully applied to optimization problems in different areas. A statistical mechanics model for its dynamics is proposed based on the…
We study a birth and death model for the adapatation of a sexual population to an environment. The population is structured by a phenotypical trait, and, possibly, an age variable. Recombination is modeled by Fisher's infinitesimal…
Recent studies have consistently inferred high rates of adaptive molecular evolution between Drosophila species. At the same time, the Drosophila genome evolves under different rates of recombination, which results in partial genetic…
Many studies have analyzed how variability in reproductive success affects fitness. However, each study tends to focus on a particular problem, leaving unclear the overall structure of variability in populations. This fractured conceptual…
Genetic regulation is a key component in development, but a clear understanding of the structure and dynamics of genetic networks is not yet at hand. In this work we investigate these properties within an artificial genome model originally…
We introduce a generalization of the parallel, or Crow-Kimura, and Eigen models of molecular evolution to represent the exchange of genetic information between individuals in a population. We study the effect of different schemes of genetic…
Cryptic genetic sequences have attenuated effects on phenotypes. In the classic view, relaxed selection allows cryptic genetic diversity to build up across individuals in a population, providing alleles that may later contribute to…
In human societies the probability of strategy adoption from a given person may be affected by the personal features. Now we investigate how an artificially imposed restricted ability to reproduce, overruling ones fitness, affects an…
Clusters of genes that have evolved by repeated segmental duplication present difficult challenges throughout genomic analysis, from sequence assembly to functional analysis. Improved understanding of these clusters is of utmost importance,…
Background: Speciation corresponds to the progressive establishment of reproductive barriers between groups of individuals derived from an ancestral stock. Since Darwin did not believe that reproductive barriers could be selected for, he…
Mounting evidence suggests that natural populations can harbor extensive fitness diversity with numerous genomic loci under selection. It is also known that genealogical trees for populations under selection are quantifiably different from…
Identifying drivers of complex traits from the noisy signals of genetic variation obtained from high throughput genome sequencing technologies is a central challenge faced by human geneticists today. We hypothesize that the variants…