Related papers: Absent daddy, but important father
Meiotic recombination is a fundamental feature of sexually reproducing species. It is often required for proper chromosome segregation and plays important role in adaptation and the maintenance of genetic diversity. The molecular mechanisms…
The rich and varied ways that genetic material can be passed between species has motivated extensive research into the theory of phylogenetic networks. Features that align with biological processes, or with desirable mathematical…
We model a social-encounter network where linked nodes match for reproduction in a manner depending probabilistically on each node`s attractiveness. The developed model reveals that increasing either the network`s mean degree or the…
Evolutionary theory predicts that children fare better if they resemble their father. However, if a man is promiscuous then his children tend to be (unwittingly) raised within other families; such children should fare better if they do not…
Polyploidization, whereby an organism inherits multiple copies of the genome of their parents, is an important evolutionary event that has been observed in plants and animals. One way to study such events is in terms of the ploidy number of…
Neutral speciation mechanisms based on isolation by distance and sexual selection, termed topopatric, have recently been shown to describe the observed patterns of abundance distributions and species-area relationships. Previous works have…
Unrooted phylogenetic networks are graphs used to represent evolutionary relationships. Accurately reconstructing such networks is of great relevance for evolutionary biology. It has recently been conjectured that all phylogenetic networks…
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is an important process in bacterial evolution. Current phylogeny-based approaches to capture it cannot however appropriately account for the fact that HGT can occur between bacteria living in different…
The question as to why most higher organisms reproduce sexually has remained open despite extensive research, and has been called "the queen of problems in evolutionary biology". Theories dating back to Weismann have suggested that the key…
There is a unique path from the root of a tree to any other vertex. Every vertex, except the root, has a parent: the adjoining vertex on this unique path. This is the conventional definition of the parent vertex. For complete binary trees,…
In analogy to other concepts of a similar nature, we define the inducibility of a rooted binary tree. Given a fixed rooted binary tree $B$ with $k$ leaves, we let $\gamma(B,T)$ be the proportion of all subsets of $k$ leaves in $T$ that…
DNA adsorption and naturation is modeled via two interacting flexible homopolymers coupled to a solid surface. DNA denatures if the entropy gain for unbinding the two strands overcomes the loss of binding energy. When adsorbed to a surface,…
Reconstruction of family trees, or pedigree reconstruction, for a group of individuals is a fundamental problem in genetics. The problem is known to be NP-hard even for datasets known to only contain siblings. Some recent methods have been…
Rare events have played an increasing role in molecular phylogenetics as potentially homoplasy-poor characters.In this contribution we analyze the phylogenetic information content from a combinatorial point of view by consid-ering the…
We introduce and solve a model which considers two coupled networks growing simultaneously. The dynamics of the networks is governed by the new arrival of network elements (nodes) making preferential attachments to pre-existing nodes in…
We have used the sexual Penna ageing model to show that the relation between dominance and recessiveness could be a force which optimizes the genome size. While the possibility of complementation of the damaged allele by its functional…
Excitability is an attribute of life, and is a driving force in the descent of complexity. Cellular electrical activity as realized by membrane proteins that act as either channels or transporters is the basis of excitability. Electrical…
We present different bit-string models of haploid asexual populations in which individuals may exchange part of their genome with other individuals (parasex) according to a given probability. We study the advantages of this parasex…
Reconstructing the evolutionary past of a family of genes is an important aspect of many genomic studies. To help with this, simple operations on a set of sequences called orthology relations may be employed. In addition to being…
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…