Related papers: Emergence of the protein universe in organismal ev…
In this work we develop a microscopic physical model of early evolution, where phenotype,organism life expectancy, is directly related to genotype, the stability of its proteins in their native conformations which can be determined exactly…
Current-day genomes bear the mark of the evolutionary processes. One of the strongest indications is the sequence homology among families of proteins that perform similar biological functions in different species. The number of proteins in…
We propose a model that explains the hierarchical organization of proteins in fold families. The model, which is based on the evolutionary selection of proteins by their native state stability, reproduces patterns of amino acids conserved…
Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…
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…
In this work, we discovered a fundamental connection between selection for protein stability and emergence of preferred structures of proteins. Using standard exact 3-dimensional lattice model we evolve sequences starting from random ones…
It has recently been discovered that many biological systems, when represented as graphs, exhibit a scale-free topology. One such system is the set of structural relationships among protein domains. The scale-free nature of this and other…
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…
Proteins, by virtue of their central role in most biological processes, represent one of the key subjects of the study of molecular evolution. Inherent to the indispensability of proteins for living cells is the fact that a given protein…
The ability to absorb mutations while retaining structure and function, or mutational robustness, is a remarkable property of natural proteins. In this Letter, we use a computational model of organismic evolution [Zeldovich et al, PLOS Comp…
Emergence of new protein structures has proved difficult to trace in nature and engineer in the laboratory. However, one aspect of structure evolution has proved immensely helpful for determining the three-dimensional structure of proteins…
Proteins have evolved through mutations, amino acid substitutions, since life appeared on Earth, some 109 years ago. The study of these phenomena has been of particular significance because of their impact on protein stability, function,…
In the protein sequence space, natural proteins form clusters of families which are characterized by their unique native folds whereas the great majority of random polypeptides are neither clustered nor foldable to unique structures. Since…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
Recently described stochastic models of protein evolution have demonstrated that the inclusion of structural information in addition to amino acid sequences leads to a more reliable estimation of evolutionary parameters. We present a…
The protein folding problem has attracted an increasing attention from physicists. The problem has a flavor of statistical mechanics, but possesses the most common feature of most biological problems -- the profound effects of evolution. I…
Natural protein sequences somehow encode the structural forms that these molecules adopt. Recent developments in structure-prediction are agnostic to the mechanisms by which proteins fold and represent them as static objects. However, the…
Which factors govern the evolution of mutation rates and emergence of species? Here, we address this question using a first principles model of life where population dynamics of asexual organisms is coupled to molecular properties and…
Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…
Understanding the observed variability in the number of homologs of a gene is a very important, unsolved problem that has broad implications for research into co-evolution of structure and function, gene duplication, pseudogene formation…