Related papers: Structurally constrained protein evolution: result…
Natural proteins fold to a unique, thermodynamically dominant state. Modeling of the folding process and prediction of the native fold of proteins are two major unsolved problems in biophysics. Here, we show successful all-atom ab initio…
A geometric analysis of the global properties of the energy landscape of a minimalistic model of a polypeptide is presented, which is based on the relation between dynamical trajectories and geodesics of a suitable manifold, whose metric is…
We suggest to simulate evolution of complex organisms constrained by the sole requirement of robustness in their expression patterns. This scenario is illustrated by evolving discrete logical networks with epigenetic properties. Evidence…
Neither of the two prevalent theories, namely thermodynamic stability and kinetic stability, provides a comprehensive understanding of protein folding. The thermodynamic theory is misleading because it assumes that free energy is the…
Stabilizing proteins is a foundational step in protein engineering. However, the evolutionary pressure of all extant proteins makes identifying the scarce number of mutations that will improve thermodynamic stability challenging. Deep…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…
Phylogenetics uses alignments of molecular sequence data to learn about evolutionary trees relating species. Along branches, sequence evolution is modelled using a continuous-time Markov process characterised by an instantaneous rate…
Classical population genetics a priori assigns fitness to alleles without considering molecular or functional properties of proteins that these alleles encode. Here we study population dynamics in a model where fitness can be inferred from…
A basic question of protein structural studies is to which extent mutations affect the stability. This question may be addressed starting from sequence and/or from structure. In proteomics and genomics studies prediction of protein…
The primary structure of proteins, that is their sequence, represents one of the most abundant set of experimental data concerning biomolecules. The study of correlations in families of co--evolving proteins by means of an inverse…
A common view in evolutionary biology is that mutation rates are minimised. However, studies in combinatorial optimisation and search have shown a clear advantage of using variable mutation rates as a control parameter to optimise the…
We study the stochastic evolution of four species in cyclic competition in a well mixed environment. In systems composed of a finite number $N$ of particles these simple interaction rules result in a rich variety of extinction scenarios,…
The Watts-Strogatz algorithm of transferring the square lattice to a small world network is modified by introducing preferential rewiring constrained by connectivity demand. The evolution of the network is two-step: sequential preferential…
We explore the dynamical large-deviations of a lattice heteropolymer model of a protein by means of path sampling of trajectories. We uncover the existence of non-equilibrium dynamical phase-transitions in ensembles of trajectories between…
We study the evolution of large but finite asexual populations evolving in fitness landscapes in which all mutations are either neutral or strongly deleterious. We demonstrate that despite the absence of higher fitness genotypes, adaptation…
We introduce a data-driven epistatic model of protein evolution, capable of generating evolutionary trajectories spanning very different time scales reaching from individual mutations to diverged homologs. Our in silico evolution…
Over time, a population acquires neutral genetic substitutions as a consequence of random drift. A famous result in population genetics asserts that the rate, $K$, at which these substitutions accumulate in the population coincides with the…
A long-standing goal of machine-learning-based protein engineering is to accelerate the discovery of novel mutations that improve the function of a known protein. We introduce a sampling framework for evolving proteins in silico that…
We study the cosmological evolution of domain wall networks in two and three spatial dimensions in the radiation and matter eras using a large number of high-resolution field theory simulations with a large dynamical range. We investigate…
We propose a new procedure to monitor and forecast the onset of transitions in high dimensional complex systems. We describe our procedure by an application to the Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology. The quasi-stable…