Related papers: Selection strategies for randomly partitioned gene…
The emerging field of high-throughput compartmentalized in vitro evolution is a promising new approach to protein engineering. In these experiments, libraries of mutant genotypes are randomly distributed and expressed in microscopic…
A steady influx of a single deleterious multilocus genotype will impose genetic load on the resident population and leave multiple descendants carrying various numbers of the foreign alleles. Provided that the foreign types are rare at…
In a geographically distributed population, assortative clustering plays an important role in evolution by modifying local environments. To examine its effects in a linear habitat, we consider a one-dimensional grid of cells, where each…
Multipartite viruses replicate through a puzzling evolutionary strategy. Their genome is segmented into two or more parts, and encapsidated in separate particles that appear to propagate independently. Completing the replication cycle,…
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,…
Cooperation is beneficial for the species as a whole, but, at the level of an individual, defection pays off. Natural selection is then expected to favor defectors and eliminate cooperation. This prediction is in stark contrast with the…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
Genetically identical cells in the same population can take on phenotypically variable states, leading to differentiated responses to external signals, such as nutrients and drug-induced stress. Many models and experiments have focused on a…
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…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. In stochastic descriptions of evolutionary dynamics, such as the Moran process, individuals are chosen randomly for birth and for death. If the same type is chosen for both steps,…
Transient compartments have been recently shown to be able to maintain functional replicators in the context of prebiotic studies. Motivated by this experiment, we show that a broad class of selection dynamics is able to achieve this goal.…
Natural selection and random drift are competing phenomena for explaining the evolution of populations. Combining a highly fit mutant with a population structure that improves the odds that the mutant spreads through the whole population…
We present a genetic algorithm which is distributed in two novel ways: along genotype and temporal axes. Our algorithm first distributes, for every member of the population, a subset of the genotype to each network node, rather than a…
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,…
In a co-evolutionary context, the survive probability of individual elements of a system depends on their relation with their neighbors. The natural selection process depends on the whole population, which is determined by local events…
Spatial environmental variation can either amplify or suppress the fixation of beneficial mutants in structured populations, yet the interplay of ecological factors and spatial structure in determining which outcome occurs remains…
Advances in neural recording methods enable sampling from populations of thousands of neurons during the performance of behavioral tasks, raising the question of how recorded activity relates to the theoretical models of computations…
Gene duplication is believed to play a major role in the evolution of genomic complexity. The presence of a duplicate removes the constraint of natural selection upon the gene, leading to its likely loss of function or, occasionally, the…
Phenotypes of individuals in a population of organisms are not fixed. Phenotypic fluctuations, which describe temporal variation of the phenotype of an individual or individual-to-individual variation across a population, are present in…
Species sharing a prey or a predator species may go extinct due to exploitative or apparent competition. We examine whether evolution of the shared species acts as a coexistence mechanism and to what extent the answer depends on the genetic…