Related papers: Human housekeeping genes are compact
Robustness to genetic or environmental disturbances is often considered as a key property of living systems. Yet, in spite of being discussed since the 1950s, how robustness emerges from the complexity of genetic architectures and how it…
The genes of eukaryotes are characterized by protein coding fragments, the exons, interrupted by introns, i.e. stretches of DNA which do not carry any useful information for the protein synthesis. We have analyzed the melting behavior of…
The distributed genome hypothesis states that the set of genes in a population of bacteria is distributed over all individuals that belong to the specific taxon. It implies that certain genes can be gained and lost from generation to…
We analyse the statistical properties of genealogical trees in a neutral model of a closed population with sexual reproduction and non-overlapping generations. By reconstructing the genealogy of an individual from the population evolution,…
In environments that vary frequently and unpredictably, bet-hedgers can overtake the population. Diversifying bet-hedgers have a diverse set of offspring so that, no matter the conditions they find themselves in, at least some offspring…
The domestication and subsequent selection by humans to create breeds of cattle undoubtedly altered the patterning of variation within their genomes. Strong selection to fix advantageous large-effect mutations underlying domesticability,…
We study a stochastic model proposed recently in the genetic literature to explain the heterogeneity of cell populations or of gene products. Cells are located in two colonies, whose sizes fluctuate as birth and migration processes in…
The human genotope is the convex hull of all allele frequency vectors that can be obtained from the genotypes present in the human population. In this paper we take a few initial steps towards a description of this object, which may be…
The paternally inherited Y chromosome has been widely used in population genetic studies to understand relationships among human populations. Our interpretation of Y chromosomal evidence about population history and genetics has rested on…
Many questions that we have about the history and dynamics of organisms have a geographical component: How many are there, and where do they live? How do they move and interbreed across the landscape? How were they moving a thousand years…
Plant domestication involved a process of selection through human agency of a series of traits collectively termed the domestication syndrome. Current debate concerns the pace at which domesticated plants emerged from cultivated wild…
Parts of DNA sequences known as exons and introns play very different role in coding and storage of genetic information. Here we show that their conducting properties are also very different. Taking into account long-range correlations…
Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) account for most variations between human genomes. We show how, if the genomes in a database differ only by a reasonable number of SNPs and the substrings between those SNPs are unique, then we can…
Evolution on neutral networks of genotypes has been found in models to concentrate on genotypes with high mutational robustness, to a degree determined by the topology of the network. Here analysis is generalized beyond neutral networks to…
This study proposes a data condensation method for multivariate kernel density estimation by genetic algorithm. First, our proposed algorithm generates multiple subsamples of a given size with replacement from the original sample. The…
More than 1000 complete or near-complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences have been deposited in GenBank for eight common domestic animals (i.e. cattle, dog, goat, horse, pig, sheep, yak and chicken) and their close wild ancestors or…
The usefulness of a `total-evidence' approach to human population genetics was assessed through a clustering analysis of combined genome-wide SNP datasets. The combination contained only 3146 SNPs. Detailed examination of the results…
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…
Gene expression has a stochastic component owing to the single molecule nature of the gene and the small number of copies of individual DNA binding proteins in the cell. We show how the statistics of such systems can be mapped on to quantum…
Gene regulation in eukaryotes is mainly effected through transcription factors binding to rather short recognition motifs generally located upstream of the coding region. We present a novel computational method to identify regulatory…