Related papers: Population genetics: an introduction for physicist…
The grand challenges in biology today are being shaped by powerful high-throughput technologies that have revealed the genomes of many organisms, global expression patterns of genes and detailed information about variation within…
Selection, the tendency of some traits to become more frequent than others in a population under the influence of some (natural or artificial) agency, is a key component of Darwinian evolution and countless other natural and social…
We discuss the population dynamics with selection and random diffusion, keeping the total population constant, in a fitness landscape associated with Constraint Satisfaction, a paradigm for difficult optimization problems. We obtain a phase…
Modern population genetics studies typically involve genome-wide genotyping of individuals from a diverse network of ancestries. An important, unsolved problem is how to formulate and estimate probabilistic models of observed genotypes that…
Understanding the influence of an environment on the evolution of its resident population is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Great progress has been made in homogeneous population structures while heterogeneous structures have…
Biological systems reach organizational complexity that far exceeds the complexity of any known inanimate objects. Biological entities undoubtedly obey the laws of quantum physics and statistical mechanics. However, is modern physics…
Population dynamics on a rugged landscape is studied analytically and numerically within a simple discrete model for evolution of N individuals in one-dimensional fitness space. We reduce the set of master equations to a single Fokker-Plank…
Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…
A key goal in studies of ecology and evolution is understanding the causes of phenotypic diversity in nature. Most traits of interest, such as those relating to morphology, life-history, immunity and behaviour are quantitative, and…
The population is composed of individuals characterised by their genetic strings, phenotypes and ages. We discuss the influence of probabilities of survival of the individuals on the dynamics and phenotypic variability of the population. We…
Genetic studies of human traits have revolutionized our understanding of the variation between individuals, and opened the door for numerous breakthroughs in biology, medicine and other scientific fields. And yet, the ultimate promise of…
Evolutionary algorithms, inspired by natural evolution, aim to optimize difficult objective functions without computing derivatives. Here we detail the relationship between population genetics and evolutionary optimization and formulate a…
Evolutionary dynamics and patterns of molecular evolution are strongly influenced by selection on linked regions of the genome, but our quantitative understanding of these effects remains incomplete. Recent work has focused on predicting…
In the present article the recent works to formulate laws in Darwinian evolutionary dynamics are discussed. Although there is a strong consensus that general laws in biology may exist, opinions opposing such suggestion are abundant. Based…
In evolutionary processes, population structure has a substantial effect on natural selection. Here, we analyze how motion of individuals affects constant selection in structured populations. Motion is relevant because it leads to changes…
Evolutionary models for populations of constant size are frequently studied using the Moran model, the Wright-Fisher model, or their diffusion limits. When evolution is neutral, a random genealogy given through Kingman's coalescent is used…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution through mutation and natural selection of a population that evolves on a $\bbT_d^+$ tree. We think of this model as a way of describing the evolution fitness landscape of a population. We obtain…
The use of population descriptors like race, ethnicity, and ancestry in science, medicine and public health has a long, complicated, and at times dark history, particularly for genetics, given the field's perceived importance for…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
In order to analyze data from cancer genome sequencing projects, we need to be able to distinguish causative, or "driver," mutations from "passenger" mutations that have no selective effect. Toward this end, we prove results concerning the…