Related papers: Shared quasispecies architecture in experimental a…
Understanding how viral mutant spectra organize and explore genotype space is essential for unraveling the mechanisms driving evolution at the finest scale. Here we use deep-sequencing data of an amplicon in the A2 protein of the RNA…
RNA viruses comprise vast populations of closely related, but highly genetically diverse, entities known as quasispecies. Understanding the mechanisms by which this extreme diversity is generated and maintained is fundamental when…
Viral quasispecies can be regarded as a swarm of genetically related mutants or a quasispecies (QS). A common formalism to approach QS is the replicator-mutator equation (RME). However, a problem with the RME is how to quantify the…
RNA secondary structure is an important computational model to understand how genetic variation maps into phenotypic (structural) variation. Evolutionary innovation in RNA structures is facilitated by neutral networks, large connected sets…
A quasispecies is a set of interrelated genotypes that have reached a situation of equilibrium while evolving according to the usual Darwinian principles of selection and mutation. Quasispecies studies invariably assume that it is possible…
We study the evolution of the network properties of a populated network embedded in a genotype space characterised by either a low or a high number of potential links, with particular emphasis on the connectivity and clustering. Evolution…
Motivated by observations in sequence data of herpesviruses, we introduce a multi-locus model for the joint evolution of different genotypes in a virus population that is distributed across a population of hosts. In the model, virus…
RNA virus populations will undergo processes of mutation and selection resulting in a mixed population of viral particles. High throughput sequencing of a viral population subsequently contains a mixed signal of the underlying clones. We…
Evolutionary dynamics is often viewed as a subtle process of change accumulation that causes a divergence among organisms and their genomes. However, this interpretation is an inheritance of a gradualistic view that has been challenged at…
Rapidly evolving viruses use antigenic drift as a key mechanism to evade host immunity and persist in real populations. While traditional models of antigenic drift and epidemic spread rely on low-dimensional antigenic spaces, genomic…
Gene-sharing networks provide a powerful framework to study the evolution of viruses and mobile genetic elements. These bipartite networks, which link genes to the genomes that contain them, exhibit characteristic degree distributions: a…
Genotype networks are a method used in systems biology to study the "innovability" of a set of genotypes having the same phenotype. In the past they have been applied to determine the genetic heterogeneity, and stability to mutations, of…
The structural organisation of the viral genome within its protein container, called the viral capsid, is an important aspect of virus architecture. Many single-stranded (ss) RNA viruses organise a significant part of their genome in a…
Large sets of genotypes give rise to the same phenotype because phenotypic expression is highly redundant. Accordingly, a population can accept mutations without altering its phenotype, as long as thegenotype mutates into another one on the…
The relationship between sequences and secondary structures or shapes in RNA exhibits robust statistical properties summarized by three notions: (1) the notion of a typical shape (that among all sequences of fixed length certain shapes are…
RNA virus (e.g., SARS-CoV-2) evolves in a complex manner. Studying RNA virus evolution is vital for understanding molecular evolution and medicine development. Scientists lack, however, general frameworks to characterize the dynamics of RNA…
Conventional population genetics considers the evolution of a limited number of genotypes corresponding to phenotypes with different fitness. As model phenotypes, in particular RNA secondary structure, have become computationally tractable,…
We study genetic networks that produce many species of non-coding RNA molecules that are present at a moderate density, as typically exists in the cell. The associations of the many species of these RNA are modeled physically, taking into…
In this paper we study properties of topological RNA structures, i.e.~RNA contact structures with cross-serial interactions that are filtered by their topological genus. RNA secondary structures within this framework are topological…
The prevalence of neutral mutations implies that biological systems typically have many more genotypes than phenotypes. But can the way that genotypes are distributed over phenotypes determine evolutionary outcomes? Answering such questions…