Related papers: Biology's next revolution
Studies of galaxy evolution at optical and near-infrared wavelengths have reached an interesting point in their historical development and the arrival of a new millenium provides an appropriate occasion to review the overall direction in…
``The purpose of life is to obtain knowledge, use it to live with as much satisfaction as possible, and pass it on with improvements and modifications to the next generation.'' This may sound philosophical, and the interpretation of words…
The current theory of evolution is almost the one Darwin and Wallace proposed two centuries ago and the following discoveries e.g., Mendelian genetics and neutral mutation theory have not made significant modifications. The current…
How we choose to represent our data has a fundamental impact on our ability to subsequently extract information from them. Machine learning promises to automatically determine efficient representations from large unstructured datasets, such…
We have presented the basic knowledge on the structure of molecules coding the genetic information, mechanisms of transfer of this information from DNA to proteins and phenomena connected with replication of DNA. In particular, we have…
Signal transduction, or signal-processing capability, is a fundamental property of nature that manifests universally across systems of different scales -- from quantum behaviour to the biological. This includes the detection of…
For more than 3.5 billion years, life experienced dramatic environmental extremes on Earth. These include shifts from oxygen-less to over-oxygenated atmospheres and cycling between hothouse conditions and global glaciations. Meanwhile, an…
Leveraging the vast genetic diversity within microbiomes offers unparalleled insights into complex phenotypes, yet the task of accurately predicting and understanding such traits from genomic data remains challenging. We propose a framework…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…
Gene expression is a central process to any form of life. It involves multiple temporal and functional scales that extend from specific protein-DNA interactions to the coordinated regulation of multiple genes in response to intracellular…
Transportation systems are currently being transformed by advances in information and communication technologies. The development of autonomous transportation holds the promise of providing revolutionary improvements in speed, efficiency,…
The spread of synthetic gene drives is often discussed in the context of panmictic populations connected by gene flow and described with simple deterministic models. Under such assumptions, an entire species could be altered by releasing a…
Phylogenetics is the study of the evolutionary relationships between organisms. One of the main challenges in the field is to take biological data for a group of organisms and to infer an evolutionary tree, a graph that represents these…
Recent studies of in vitro evolution of DNA via protein binding indicate that the evolution behavior is qualitatively different in different parameter regimes. I here present a general theory that is valid for a wide range of parameters,…
The ominous warnings of a `data deluge' in the life sciences from high-throughput DNA sequencing data are being supplanted by a second deluge, of cliches bemoaning our collective scientific fate unless we address the genomic data `tsunami'.…
Archean atmospheric evolution is the transition from an abiological atmosphere, to an atmosphere for which the composition and therefore climate is highly altered by life. We review the key processes and transitions in this evolution.
A vast array of transformative technologies developed over the past decade has enabled measurement and perturbation at ever increasing scale, yet our understanding of many systems remains limited by experimental capacity. Overcoming this…
A challenge in global change biology is to predict how species will respond to future environmental change and to manage these responses. To make such predictions and management actions robust to novel futures, we need to accurately…
All human diseases involve proteins, yet our current tools to characterize and quantify them are limited. To better elucidate proteins across space, time, and molecular composition, we provide provocative projections for technologies to…
In this article, we review the different models and methods to understand and estimate correlated evolution within the same genome, individual or species. We describe correlated evolution among traits, among genetic components and finally…