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The evolution of various competing cell types in tissues, and the resulting persistent tissue population, is studied numerically and analytically in a particle-based model of active tissues. Mutations change the properties of cells in…
Species sharing a prey or a predator species may go extinct due to exploitative or apparent competition. We examine whether evolution of the shared species acts as a coexistence mechanism and to what extent the answer depends on the genetic…
The role of epistatic interactions among loci is a central question in evolutionary biology and is increasingly relevant in the genomic age. While the population genetics of compensatory substitution have received considerable attention,…
We study the population genetics of Evolution in the important special case of weak selection, in which all fitness values are assumed to be close to one another. We show that in this regime natural selection is tantamount to the…
One of the most challenging issues of evolutionary biology concerns speciation, the emergence of new species from an initial one. The huge amount of species found in nature demands a simple and robust mechanism. Yet, no consensus has been…
Prion and prion-like molecules are a type of self replicating aggregate protein that have been implicated in a variety of neurodegenerative diseases. Over recent decades the molecular dynamics of prions have been characterized both…
In Misrepair-accumulation theory, we have proposed a Misrepair mechanism for interpreting aging. However, Misrepair mechanism is also important in biological adaptation. Misrepair is a strategy of repair for increasing the surviving chance…
Maintenance of sexual reproduction and genetic recombination imposes physiological costs when compared to parthenogenic reproduction, most prominently: for maintaining the corresponding (molecular) machinery, for finding a mating partner,…
Two important problems affect the ability of asexual populations to accumulate beneficial mutations, and hence to adapt. First, clonal interference causes some beneficial mutations to be outcompeted by more-fit mutations which occur in the…
The adaptive immune system constantly remodels its lymphocyte repertoire for better protection against future pathogens. Its ability to improve antigen recognition on the fly relies on somatic mutation and selective expansion of B…
Cryptic genetic sequences have attenuated effects on phenotypes. In the classic view, relaxed selection allows cryptic genetic diversity to build up across individuals in a population, providing alleles that may later contribute to…
We study the competition between several advantageous mutants in an asexual population (clonal interference) as a function of the time between the appearance of the mutants, their selective advantages, and the rate of deleterious mutations.…
Gene duplications are one of major primary driving forces for evolutionary novelty. We took population genetics models of genes duplicate to study how evolutionary forces acting during the fixation of mutant allele at duplicate loci. We…
Competition between independently arising beneficial mutations is enhanced in spatial populations due to the linear rather than exponential growth of clones. Recent theoretical studies have pointed out that the resulting fitness dynamics is…
Beneficial reversals of dominance reduce the costs of genetic trade-offs and can enable selection to maintain genetic variation for fitness. Beneficial dominance reversals are characterized by the beneficial allele for a given context (e.g.…
It is likely that the strength of selection acting upon a mutation varies through time due to changes in the environment. However, most population genetic theory assumes that the strength of selection remains constant. Here we investigate…
What is motivation and how does it work? Where do goals come from and how do they vary within and between species and individuals? Why do we prefer some things over others? MEDO is a theoretical framework for understanding these questions…
Eukaryote genomes contain excessively introns, inter-genic and other non-genic sequences that appear to have no vital functional role or phenotype manifestation. Their existence, a long-standing puzzle, is viewed from the principle of…
Major discrepancies have been noted for some time between fossil ages and molecular divergence dates for a variety of taxa. Recently, systematic trends within avian clades have been uncovered. The trends show that the disparity is much…
The macromolecules that encode and translate information in living systems, DNA and RNA, exhibit distinctive structural asymmetries, including homochirality or mirror image asymmetry and $3' - 5'$ directionality, that are invariant across…