Related papers: Adaptive evolution of hybrid bacteria by horizonta…
We considered a {multi-block} molecular model of biological evolution, in which fitness is a function of the mean types of alleles located at different parts (blocks) of the genome. We formulated an infinite population model with selection…
Gene networks exhibiting oscillatory dynamics are widespread in biology. The minimal regulatory designs giving rise to oscillations have been implemented synthetically and studied by mathematical modeling. However, most of the available…
Population diversity is crucial in evolutionary algorithms as it helps with global exploration and facilitates the use of crossover. Despite many runtime analyses showing advantages of population diversity, we have no clear picture of how…
Mutations sometimes increase contagiousness for evolving pathogens. During an epidemic, scientists use viral genome data to infer a shared evolutionary history and connect this history to geographic spread. We propose a model that directly…
Range expansion and range shifts are crucial population responses to climate change. Genetic consequences are not well understood but are clearly coupled to ecological dynamics that, in turn, are driven by shifting climate conditions. We…
Boolean networks with canalizing functions are used to model gene regulatory networks. In order to learn how such networks may behave under evolutionary forces, we simulate the evolution of a single Boolean network by means of an adaptive…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) can be used for model fitting when the likelihood function is intractable but simulating from the model is feasible. However, even a single evaluation of a complex model may take several hours,…
Following transmission, HIV-1 evolves into a diverse population, and next generation sequencing enables us to detect variants occurring at low frequencies. Studying viral evolution at the level of whole genomes was hitherto not possible…
We consider the evolutionary trajectories traced out by an infinite population undergoing mutation-selection dynamics in static, uncorrelated random fitness landscapes. Starting from the population that consists of a single genotype, the…
Statistical physics can describe the behavior of microbial populations consisting of many heterogeneous individuals. A direct consequence is the existence of phase transitions, where the behavior of a population changes discontinuously upon…
Organisms result from adaptive processes interacting across different time scales. One such interaction is that between development and evolution. Models have shown that development sweeps over several traits in a single agent, sometimes…
Despite recent advances in population-based structural health monitoring (PBSHM), knowledge transfer between highly-disparate structures (i.e., heterogeneous populations) remains a challenge. The current work proposes that heterogeneous…
Mutational robustness quantifies the effect of random mutations on fitness. When mutational robustness is high, most mutations do not change fitness or have only a minor effect on it. From the point of view of fitness landscapes, robust…
Quantification of heritability is a fundamental desideratum in genetics, which allows an assessment of the contribution of additive genetic variation to the variability of a trait of interest. The traditional computational approaches for…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
The evolution of drug resistance in HIV occurs by the fixation of specific, well-known, drug-resistance mutations, but the underlying population genetic processes are not well understood. By analyzing within-patient longitudinal sequence…
The capacity to adapt can greatly influence the success of systems that need to compensate for damaged parts, learn how to achieve robust performance in new environments, or exploit novel opportunities that originate from new technological…
Horizontal gene transfer events partition a gene tree $T$ and thus, its leaf set into subsets of genes whose evolutionary history is described by speciation and duplication events alone. Indirect phylogenetic methods can be used to infer…
Recent work has shown that expression level is the main predictor of a gene’s evolutionary rate, and that more highly expressed genes evolve slower. A possible explanation for this observation is selection for proteins which fold…
This chapter gives a synopsis of recent approaches to model and analyse the evolution of microbial populations under selection. The first part reviews two population genetic models of Lenski's long-term evolution experiment with Escherichia…