Related papers: What Omicron Does, and How It Does It
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…
Although previous infection and vaccination provide protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection, both reinfection and breakthrough infection are possible events whose occurrence would increase with time after first exposure to the antigen and…
Epidemic spreading over populations networks has been an important subject of research for several decades, and especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Most epidemic outbreaks are likely to create multiple mutations during their spreading…
Experimental evolution has yielded surprising insights into human history and evolution by shedding light on the roles of chance and contingency in history and evolution, and on the deep evolutionary roots of cooperation, conflict and kin…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
The increasing spread of COVID-19, caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, raises concerns about the extent to which mutations have occurred across the viral genome. We present a partial replication of an earlier 2021 study by Wang, R. et al. that…
The crisis caused by the COVID-19 outbreak around the globe raised an increasing concern about the ongoing emergence of variants of SARS-CoV-2 that may evade the immune response provided by vaccines. New variants appear due to mutation, and…
Cotranslational folding depends on the folding speed and stability of the nascent protein. It remains difficult, however, to predict which proteins cotranslationally fold. Here, we simulate evolution of model proteins to investigate how…
A fundamental question for evolutionary biology is why rates of evolution vary dramatically between proteins. Perhaps surprisingly, it is controversial how much a protein's functional importance affects its rate of evolution. In most…
A two-step contagion model with a single seed serves as a cornerstone for understanding the critical behaviors and underlying mechanism of discontinuous percolation transitions induced by cascade dynamics. When the contagion spreads from a…
A central goal of evolutionary biology is to explain the origins and distribution of diversity across life. Beyond species or genetic diversity, we also observe diversity in the circuits (genetic or otherwise) underlying complex functional…
More often than not, bad decisions are bad regardless of where and when they are made. Information sharing might thus be utilized to mitigate them. Here we show that sharing the information about strategy choice between players residing on…
The development and evolution of malware including computer viruses, worms, and trojan horses, is shown to be closely analogous to the process of community succession long recognized in ecology. In particular, both changes in the overall…
The mechanisms underlying eco-evolutionary dynamics (the feedback between ecological and evolutionary processes) are often unknown. Here, we propose that classical theory from behavioral ecology can provide a greater understanding of the…
At odds with a traditional view of molecular evolution that seeks a descent-with-modification relationship between functional sequences, new functions can emerge {\it de novo} with relative ease. At early times of molecular evolution,…
In the past decade, advances in genome sequencing have allowed researchers to uncover the history of hybridization in diverse groups of species, including our own. Although the field has made impressive progress in documenting the extent of…
Dynamics of evolutionary games strongly depend on underlying networks. We study the coevolutionary prisoner's dilemma in which players change their local networks as well as strategies (i.e., cooperate or defect). This topic has been…
We consider the effect of network structure on the evolution of a population. Models of this kind typically consider a population of fixed size and distribution. Here we consider eco-evolutionary dynamics where population size and…
Natural selection explains how life has evolved over millions of years from more primitive forms. The speed at which this happens, however, has sometimes defied formal explanations when based on random (uniformly distributed) mutations.…
Our understanding of risk preferences can be sharpened by considering their evolutionary basis. The existing literature has focused on two sources of risk: idiosyncratic risk and aggregate risk. We introduce a new source of risk, heritable…