Related papers: Absent daddy, but important father
The provision of intergenerational care, via the Grandmother Hypothesis, has been implicated in the evolution of post-fertile longevity, particularly in humans. However, if grandmothering does provide fitness benefits, a key question is why…
A large offspring number diploid biparental multilocus population model of Moran type is our object of study. At each timestep, a pair of diploid individuals drawn uniformly at random contribute offspring to the population. The number of…
This paper considers a natural variant of the $d$-dimensional multitype contact process in which individuals can be fertile or sterile. Fertile individuals of type $i$ give birth to an offspring of their own type at rate $\lambda_i$, the…
A fundamental issue discussed in evolutionary biology is the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms. Here we develop non-robust models provided in [1] and attempt to get robust models investigated how differentiation of…
Background: Hybridogenesis is a very interesting example of reproduction which seems to integrate the sexual and clonal processes in one system. In a case of frogs, described in the paper, two parental species - Rana lessonae and Rana…
The problem of unicellular-multicellular transition is one of the main issues that is discussing in evolutionary biology. In [1] the fitness of a colony of cells is considered in terms of its two basic components, viability and fecundity.…
It has recently been suggested that evolution exploits a form of fitness landscape smoothing within eukaryotic sex due to the haploid-diploid cycle. This short paper presents a simple modification to the standard evolutionary computing…
The emergence of agriculture is suggested to have driven extensive human population growths. However, genetic evidence from maternal mitochondrial genomes suggests major population expansions began before the emergence of agriculture.…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Pedigrees, or family trees, are graphs of family relationships that are used to study inheritance. A fundamental problem in computational biology is to find, for a pedigree with $n$ individuals genotyped at every site, a set of…
The prevalence of sexual reproduction ("sex") in eukaryotes is an enigma of evolutionary biology. Sex increases genetic variation only tells its long-term superiority in essence. The accumulation of harmful mutations causes an immediate and…
Phylogenetic networks are a generalisation of phylogenetic trees that allow for more complex evolutionary histories that include hybridisation-like processes. It is of considerable interest whether a network can be considered `tree-like' or…
Many questions that we have about the history and dynamics of organisms have a geographical component: How many are there, and where do they live? How do they move and interbreed across the landscape? How were they moving a thousand years…
Genome organization in eukaryotes during interphase stems from the delicate balance between non-random correlations present in the DNA polynucleotide linear sequence and the physico/chemical reactions which shape continuously the form and…
We propose a partitioning of the set of unlabelled, connected cubic graphs into two disjoint subsets named genes and descendants, where the cardinality of the descendants is much larger than that of the genes. The key distinction between…
In this paper, we introduce a new type of relation between knots called the descendant relation. One knot $H$ is a descendant of another knot $K$ if $H$ can be obtained from a minimal crossing diagram of $K$ by some number of crossing…
A major challenge in biology is explaining how novel characters originate, however, the molecular mechanisms that underlie the emergence of evolutionary innovations are unclear. Here we show that while gene expression in the uterus evolves…
The genetic material of a eukaryotic cell comprises both nuclear DNA (ncDNA) and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). These differ markedly in several aspects but nevertheless must encode proteins that are compatible with one another. Here we…
This paper develops simplified mathematical models describing the mutation-selection balance for the asexual and sexual replication pathways in {\it Saccharomyces cerevisiae}. We assume diploid genomes consisting of two chromosomes, and we…
Most of major algorithms for phylogenetic tree reconstruction assume that sequences in the analyzed set either do not have any offspring, or that parent sequences can maximally mutate into just two descendants. The graph resulting from such…