Related papers: Selection, Mutations and Codon Usage in Bacterial …
Bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics by a multitude of mechanisms. A central, yet unsolved question is how resistance evolution affects cell growth at different drug levels. Here we develop a fitness model that predicts growth rates of…
Bacteria can form a great variety of spatially heterogeneous cell density patterns, ranging from simple concentric rings to dynamical spiral waves appearing in growing colonies. These pattern formation phenomena are important as they…
The problem of the directionality of genome evolution is studied from the information-theoretic view. We propose that the function-coding information quantity of a genome always grows in the course of evolution through sequence duplication,…
The evolution of structure in biology is driven by accretion and change. Accretion brings together disparate parts to form bigger wholes. Change provides opportunities for growth and innovation. Here we review patterns and processes that…
This paper theoretically analyzes a phenomenological stochastic model for bacterial growth. This model comprises cell division and the linear growth of cells, where growth rates and cell cycles are drawn from lognormal distributions. We…
The development of a large non-coding fraction in eukaryotic DNA and the phenomenon of the code-bloat in the field of evolutionary computations show a striking similarity. This seems to suggest that (in the presence of mechanisms of code…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
This paper presents a real-time simulation involving ''protozoan-like'' cells that evolve by natural selection in a physical 2D ecosystem. Selection pressure is exerted via the requirements to collect mass and energy from the surroundings…
We investigate the outflux of ions through the channels in a cell membrane. The channels undergo an open/close cycle according to a periodic schedule. Our study is based both on theoretical considerations relying on homogenization theory,…
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…
Consider a branching process with a homogeneous reproduction law. Sampling a single cell uniformly from the population at a time $T > 0$ and looking along the sampled cell's ancestral lineage, we find that the reproduction law is…
Antimicrobial protocols - using substances such as antibiotics or disinfectants - remain the preferred option for preventing the spread of pathogenic bacteria. However, bacteria can develop mechanisms to reduce their antimicrobial…
It has recently been suggested that the fundamental haploid-diploid cycle of eukaryotic sex exploits a rudimentary form of the Baldwin effect. Thereafter the other associated phenomena can be explained as evolution tuning the amount and…
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…
A common theme among the proposed models for network epidemics is the assumption that the propagating object, i.e., a virus or a piece of information, is transferred across the nodes without going through any modification or evolution.…
Boolean networks with canalizing functions are used to model gene regulatory networks. In order to learn how such networks may behave under evolutionary forces, we simulate the evolution of a single Boolean network by means of an adaptive…
The tendencies described in this work were revealed in the course of examination of adenine and uracil distribution in the mRNA encoding sequence. The study also discusses the usage of codons occupied by the amino acid arginine in the table…
We describe the evolution of macromolecules as an information transmission process and apply tools from Shannon information theory to it. This allows us to isolate three independent, competing selective pressures that we term compression,…
Whether evolution can be predicted is a key question in evolutionary biology. Here we set out to better understand the repeatability of evolution. We explored experimentally the effect of mutation supply and the strength of selective…
The Darwinian paradigm of biological evolution is based on the separability of the variation and selection processes. As a result, the population thinking had always been an integral part of the Darwinian approach. I propose an alternative…