Related papers: Biophysical inference of epistasis and the effects…
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…
The interconnected processes of protein folding, mutations, epistasis, and evolution have all been the subject of extensive analysis throughout the years due to their significance for structural and evolutionary biology. The origin…
Epistasis, or the context-dependence of the effects of mutations, limits our ability to predict the functional impact of combinations of mutations, and ultimately our ability to predict evolutionary trajectories. Information about the…
Genetic interactions can strongly influence the fitness effects of individual mutations, yet the impact of these epistatic interactions on evolutionary dynamics remains poorly understood. Here we investigate the evolutionary role of…
Defining the extent of epistasis - the non-independence of the effects of mutations - is essential for understanding the relationship of genotype, phenotype, and fitness in biological systems. The applications cover many areas of biological…
Functional proteins must fold with some minimal stability to a structure that can perform a biochemical task. Here we use a simple model to investigate the relationship between the stability requirement and the capacity of a protein to…
Natural protein sequences somehow encode the structural forms that these molecules adopt. Recent developments in structure-prediction are agnostic to the mechanisms by which proteins fold and represent them as static objects. However, the…
Natural protein sequences contain a record of their history. A common constraint in a given protein family is the ability to fold to specific structures, and it has been shown possible to infer the main native ensemble by analyzing…
We present a sequence-based probabilistic formalism that directly addresses co-operative effects in networks of interacting positions in proteins, providing significantly improved contact prediction, as well as accurate quantitative…
We introduce a data-driven epistatic model of protein evolution, capable of generating evolutionary trajectories spanning very different time scales reaching from individual mutations to diverged homologs. Our in silico evolution…
In the course of evolution, proteins undergo important changes in their amino acid sequences, while their three-dimensional folded structure and their biological function remain remarkably conserved. Thanks to modern sequencing techniques,…
The contribution to an organism's phenotype from one genetic locus may depend upon the status of other loci. Such epistatic interactions among loci are now recognized as fundamental to shaping the process of adaptation in evolving…
As an example of topic where biology and physics meet, we present the issue of protein folding and stability, and the development of thermodynamics-based bioinformatics tools that predict the stability and thermal resistance of proteins and…
Epistatic interactions between residues determine a protein's adaptability and shape its evolutionary trajectory. When a protein experiences a changed environment, it is under strong selection to find a peak in the new fitness landscape. It…
Modern biomedicine is challenged to predict the effects of genetic variation. Systematic functional assays of point mutants of proteins have provided valuable empirical information, but vast regions of sequence space remain unexplored.…
Genotypic fitness landscapes are constructed by assessing the fitness of all possible combinations of a given number of mutations. In the last years, several experimental fitness landscapes have been completely resolved. As fitness…
Proteins have evolved through mutations, amino acid substitutions, since life appeared on Earth, some 109 years ago. The study of these phenomena has been of particular significance because of their impact on protein stability, function,…
Protein sequences serve as a natural record of the evolutionary constraints that shape their functional structures. We show that it is possible to use only sequence information to go beyond predicting native structures and global stability…
The understanding, and even the description of protein folding is impeded by the complexity of the process. Much of this complexity can be described and understood by taking a statistical approach to the energetics of protein conformation,…
The function of proteins arises from cooperative interactions and rearrangements of their amino acids, which exhibit large-scale dynamical modes. Long-range correlations have also been revealed in protein sequences, and this has motivated…