Related papers: DNA Replication Timing, Genome Stability and Non-a…
Twenty years ago, after analysing palaeontological data, Raup and Sepkoski suggested that mass extinctions on Earth appear cyclically in time with a period of approximately 26 million years (My). To explain the 26My period, a number of…
Motivation: Millions of genes in the modern species belong to only thousands of `gene families'. A gene family includes instances of the same gene in different species (orthologs) and duplicate genes in the same species (paralogs). Genes…
The terrestrial fossil record shows a significant variation in the extinction and origination rates of species during the past half billion years. Numerous studies have claimed an association between this variation and the motion of the Sun…
We present novel analytical results about ecosystem species diversity that stem from a proposed coarse grained neutral model based on birth-death processes. The relevance of the problem lies in the urgency for understanding and synthesizing…
The ability of the adaptive immune system to respond to arbitrary pathogens stems from the broad diversity of immune cell surface receptors (TCRs). This diversity originates in a stochastic DNA editing process (VDJ recombination) that acts…
A mathematical model of genome degradation is proposed that takes into account a variable rate of mutation and increasing number of cells in a developing human organism. The model explains known properties of cancer development, in…
The nature of the quantitative distribution of the 64 DNA codons in the human genome has been an issue of debate for over a decade. Some groups have proposed that the quantitative distribution of the DNA codons ordered as a rank-frequency…
Speciation is of fundamental importance to understanding the huge diversity of life on Earth. In contrast to current phenomenological models, we develop a biophysically motivated approach to study speciation involving the co-evolution of…
Resource are often not uniformly distributed within a population. Spatial variations of concentration of a resource, change the fitness of competing strategies locally. The notion of fitness varying with respect to both genotype and…
The study of adaptive dynamics, involving many degrees of freedom on two separated timescales, one for fast changes of state variables and another for the slow adaptation of parameters controlling the former's dynamics is crucial for…
We suggest a possible correlation between the ionization events caused by the background neutron radiation and the experimental data on mutations with damage in the DNA repair mechanism, coming from the Long Term Evolution Experiment in E.…
The effect of phenotypic plasticity on evolution, the so-called Baldwin effect, has been studied extensively for more than 100 years. Plasticity is known to influence the speed of evolution towards a specific genetic configuration, but…
Based on statistical analysis of the complete genome sequences, a remote relationship has been observed between the evolution of the genetic code and the three domain tree of life. The existence of such a remote relationship need to be…
Many studies have analyzed how variability in reproductive success affects fitness. However, each study tends to focus on a particular problem, leaving unclear the overall structure of variability in populations. This fractured conceptual…
Bacterial chemotaxis systems are as diverse as the environments that bacteria inhabit, but how much environmental variation can cells tolerate with a single system? Diversification of a single chemotaxis system could serve as an…
We study the stationary state of a population evolving under the action of random genetic drift, selection and recombination in which both deleterious and reverse beneficial mutations can occur. We find that the equilibrium fraction of…
One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…
A simulation model of a population having internal (genetic) structure is presented. The population is subject to selection pressure coming from the environment which is the same in the whole system but changes in time. Reproduction has a…
The problem of the rate and mechanisms of biological evolution was considered. It was shown that species could not be formed due to undirected mutations in characteristic times of about one million years. A mechanism of deterministic…
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…