Related papers: Absent daddy, but important father
We discuss two different ways of chromosomes' and genomes' evolution. Purifying selection dominates in large panmictic populations, where Mendelian law of independent gene assortment is valid. If the populations are small, recombination…
This paper develops a simplified set of models describing asexual and sexual replication in unicel- lular diploid organisms. The models assume organisms whose genomes consist of two chromosomes, where each chromosome is assumed to be…
It has recently been suggested that the fundamental haploid-diploid cycle of eukaryotic sex exploits a rudimentary form of the Baldwin effect. Thereafter the other associated phenomena can be explained as evolution tuning the amount and…
When a founder cell and its progeny divide with incomplete cytokinesis, a network forms in which each intercellular bridge corresponds to a past mitotic event. Networks built in this manner are required for gamete production in many…
It has been suggested that the fundamental haploid-diploid cycle of eukaryotic sex exploits a rudimentary form of the Baldwin effect. This paper uses the well-known NKCS model to explore the effects of coevolution upon the behaviour of…
This paper develops models describing asexual and sexual replication in sporulating organisms. Replication via sporulation is the replication strategy for all multicellular life, and may even be observed in unicellular life (such as with…
In this work of speculative science, scientists from a distant star system explain the emergence and consequences of triparentalism, when three individuals are required for sexual reproduction, which is the standard form of mating on their…
Gynandromorphs are creatures where at least two different body sections are a different sex. Bilateral gynandromorphs are half male and half female. Here we develop a theory of gynandromorph ontogeny based on developmental control networks.…
Several recent studies show that companion cells in flowering plant gametophytes relax epigenetic control of transposable elements (TEs) to promote production of small RNA that presumably assist nearby reproductive cells in management of…
Development from egg to embryo to adult is a fascinating instance of biological self-organization for which genetics has supplied us with a parts list. It remains to find the principles organizing the assembly of those parts. In the last…
We discovered a dynamic phase transition induced by sexual reproduction. The dynamics is a pure Darwinian rule with both fundamental ingredients to drive evolution: 1) random mutations and crossings which act in the sense of increasing the…
"Epigenetic Tracking" is an evo-devo method to generate arbitrary 2d or 3d shapes; as such, it belongs to the field of "artificial embryology". In silico experiments have proved the effectiveness of the method in devo-evolving shapes of any…
Recent work has proven the existence of extreme inbreeding in a European ancestry sample taken from the contemporary UK population \cite{nature_01}. This result brings our attention again to a math problem related to inbreeding family trees…
Under random mating, a progeny's alleles are independently sampled from the parental gene pools. Here is a new proof which avoids the usual algebraic complexity, based on a restated Mendel's First Law. Another simplified proof along the old…
The paper discusses a connection between asymmetric reproduction -- that is reproduction in a parent-child relationship where the parent does not mutate during reproduction --, the fact that all non-viral lifeforms bear genes of their…
We present methods for inference about relationships between contributors to a DNA mixture and other individuals of known genotype: a basic example would be testing whether a contributor to a mixture is the father of a child of known…
Maintaining tissue homeostasis requires appropriate regulation of stem cell differentiation. The Waddington landscape posits that gene circuits in a cell form a potential landscape of different cell types, wherein cells follow attractors of…
The amount of completely sequenced chloroplast genomes increases rapidly every day, leading to the possibility to build large scale phylogenetic trees of plant species. Considering a subset of close plant species defined according to their…
Much has been debated about the benefit of sexual over asexual reproduction in terms of evolutionary fitness. Here we focus on the advantage that may be brought about by the process of mating, where the choosing of mates contributes to the…
The Coefficient of Parentage (COP) between two individuals is the expected inbreeding of their offspring. Originally exploited by animal breeders, is now a routine calculation among plant breeders as part of crop improvement programs. Here…