Related papers: "Junk" DNA as a genetic decoy
Molecular biology features numerous complexes of proteins that coordinate in an interlocking fashion to fulfill different functions. Adaptive evolution explains some of this complexity, but needn't be the default when neutral explanations…
Generative adversarial networks (GAN) have been effective for learning generative models for real-world data. However, existing GANs (GAN and its variants) tend to suffer from training problems such as instability and mode collapse. In this…
Identifying drivers of complex traits from the noisy signals of genetic variation obtained from high throughput genome sequencing technologies is a central challenge faced by human geneticists today. We hypothesize that the variants…
Robustness, the insensitivity of some of a biological system's functionalities to a set of distinct conditions, is intimately linked to fitness. Recent studies suggest that it may also play a vital role in enabling the evolution of species.…
How mutations accumulate in genomes is the central question of molecular evolution theories, however our understanding of this process is far from complete. Drake's rule is a notoriously universal property of genomes from microbes to…
When mutation rates are low, natural selection remains effective, and increasing the mutation rate can give rise to an increase in adaptation rate. When mutation rates are high to begin with, however, increasing the mutation rate may have a…
Disgust is a basic emotion that serves to avoid contaminants, and is central to the behavioural immune system. While disgust-motivated avoidance occurs in bonobos and chimpanzees, humans show uniquely high levels of contamination…
Neural text detectors aim to decide the characteristics that distinguish neural (machine-generated) from human texts. To challenge such detectors, adversarial attacks can alter the statistical characteristics of the generated text, making…
Objections to Darwinian evolution are often based on the time required to carry out the necessary mutations. Seemingly, exponential numbers of mutations are needed. We show that such estimates ignore the effects of natural selection, and…
Cancer progression involves the sequential accumulation of genetic alterations that cumulatively shape the tumour phenotype. In prostate cancer, tumours can follow divergent evolutionary trajectories that lead to distinct subtypes, but the…
Gene duplications are one of major primary driving forces for evolutionary novelty. We took population genetics models of genes duplicate to study how evolutionary forces acting during the fixation of mutant allele at duplicate loci. We…
Malware detection have used machine learning to detect malware in programs. These applications take in raw or processed binary data to neural network models to classify as benign or malicious files. Even though this approach has proven…
Weak purifying selection, acting on many linked mutations, may play a major role in shaping patterns of molecular evolution in natural populations. Yet efforts to infer these effects from DNA sequence data are limited by our incomplete…
We study the probabilities of evolution based on random mutations and natural selection. We conclude that evolution to multicellular eukaryots, or even prokaryots, is unlikely to be the result of only random mutations. Complex organisms…
We generalize the standard Penna bit-string model of biological ageing by assuming that each deleterious mutation diminishes the survival probability in every time interval by a small percentage. This effect is added to the usual lethal but…
Convolutional codes are error-correcting linear codes that utilize shift registers to encode. These codes have an arbitrary block size and they can incorporate both past and current information bits. DNA codes represent DNA sequences and…
In a letter published in Molecular Biology Evolution [10], Chen and Zhang argue that the variation of the mutation rate along the Escherichia coli genome that we recently reported [3] cannot be evolutionarily optimised. To support this…
The two classic theories for the existence of sexual replication are that sex purges deleterious mutations from a population, and that sex allows a population to adapt more rapidly to changing environments. These two theories have often…
In this paper, we extend a model of host-parasite co-evolution to incorporate the semi-conservative nature of DNA replication for both the host and the parasite. We find that the optimal mutation rate for the semi-conservative and…
The phenotype of any organism on earth is, in large part, the consequence of interplay between numerous gene products encoded in the genome, and such interplay between gene products affects the evolutionary fate of the genome itself through…