Related papers: Noncoding RNAs evolutionarily extend animal lifesp…
Background: The evolution of microRNA regulation in metazoans is a mysterious process: MicroRNA sequences are highly conserved among distal organisms, but on the other hand, there is no evident conservation of their targets. Results: We…
The discovery of complex multicellular organism development took millions of years of evolution. The genome of such a multicellular organism guides the development of its body from a single cell, including its control system. Our goal is to…
Most living systems rely on double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) to store their genetic information and perpetuate themselves. This biological information has been considered the main target of evolution. However, here we show that symmetries and…
Evolution and learning are two of the fundamental mechanisms by which life adapts in order to survive and to transcend limitations. These biological phenomena inspired successful computational methods such as evolutionary algorithms and…
In this communication, direction of evolutionary variability of parameters of genome size and structurally functional activity of plants in angiosperm taxa among life forms, are analysed. It is shown that, in the Cretaceous-Cenozoic era,…
`Entropy' appears as driving force in many different evolution equations, both deterministic and stochastic, and in these equations this `entropy' also takes different forms. We show how all these examples can be understood as different…
Non-coding RNAs are crucial regulators of gene expression in prokaryotes and eukaryotes, but it remains poorly understood how they affect the dynamics of transcriptional networks. We analyzed the temporal characteristics of the…
In this article, I put forward the idea that the neoplastic process (NP) has deep evolutionary roots and make specific predictions about the connection between cancer and the formation of the first embryo, which allowed for the evolutionary…
Regulatory networks consist of interacting molecules with a high degree of mutual chemical specificity. How can these molecules evolve when their function depends on maintenance of interactions with cognate partners and simultaneous…
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…
Promoters and enhancers are cis-regulatory elements (CREs), DNA sequences that bind transcription factor (TF) proteins to up- or down-regulate target genes. Decades-long efforts yielded TF-DNA interaction models that predict how strongly an…
Neural codes appear efficient. Naturally, neuroscientists contend that an efficient process is responsible for generating efficient codes. They argue that natural selection is the efficient process that generates those codes. Although…
Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented. Physical approach, which takes advantage of their extensively quantified mortality, establishes that its dominant fraction yields…
Statistical analysis of distributions of occurrence frequencies of short words in 108 microbial complete genomes reveals the existence of a set of universal "root-sequence lengths" shared by all microbial genomes. These lengths and their…
Understanding how decision making changes across the lifespan is a central challenge for neuroscience, yet research on cognitive aging has remained largely disconnected from the theoretical and computational advances that now shape modern…
Sex chromosomes have independently evolved in species with separate sexes in most lineages across the tree of life. However, the well-accepted canonical model of sex chromosome evolution is not universally supported. There is no single…
We introduce a simple model for DNA evolution. Using the method of Peng et al.$^1$, we investigate the fractal properties of the system. For small chains and chains of intermediate size we find a fractal exponent that indicates the…
Deep phenotyping is an emerging conceptual paradigm and experimental approach that seeks to measure many aspects of phenotypes and link them to understand the underlying biology. Successful deep phenotyping has mostly been applied in…
The chiral nature of DNA plays a crucial role in cellular processes. Here we use magnetic tweezers to explore one of the signatures of this chirality, the coupling between stretch and twist deformations. We show that the extension of a…
Much recent work has explored molecular and population-genetic constraints on the rate of protein sequence evolution. The best predictor of evolutionary rate is expression level, for reasons which have remained unexplained. Here, we…