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Major climatic and geological events but also population history (secondary contacts) have generated cycles of population isolation and connection of long and short periods. Recent empirical and theoretical studies suggest that fast evolutionary processes ...
Living at high altitude is one of the most difficult challenges that humans had to cope with during their evolution. Whereas several genomic studies have revealed some of the genetic bases of adaptations in Tibetan, Andean, and Ethiopian populations, relat ...
Background During the past decades, neutral DNA markers have been extensively employed to study demography, population genetics and structure in livestock, but less interest has been devoted to the evaluation of livestock adaptive potential through the ide ...
In protein-coding genes, synonymous mutations are often thought not to affect fitness and therefore are not subject to natural selection. Yet increasingly, cases of non-neutral evolution at certain synonymous sites were reported over the last decade. To ev ...
In the age of next-generation sequencing, the availability of increasing amounts and improved quality of data at decreasing cost ought to allow for a better understanding of how natural selection is shaping the genome than ever before. However, alternative ...
Populations of human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), a large DNA virus, are highly polymorphic in patient samples, which may allow for rapid evolution within human hosts. To understand HCMV evolution, longitudinally sampled genomic populations from the urine and p ...
Whether, when, how, and why increased complexity evolves in biological populations is a longstanding open question. In this work we combine a recently developed method for evolving virtual organisms with an information-theoretic metric of morphological com ...
Natural selection drives populations towards higher fitness, but crossing fitness valleys or plateaus may facilitate progress up a rugged fitness landscape involving epistasis. We investigate quantitatively the effect of subdividing an asexual population o ...
Moving from the exact result that drainage network configurations minimizing total energy dissipation are stationary solutions of the general equation describing landscape evolution, we review the static properties and the dynamic origins of the scale-inva ...
A key, yet often neglected, component of digital evolution and evolutionary models is the 'selection method' which assigns fitness (number of offspring) to individuals based on their performance scores (efficiency in performing tasks). Here, we study with ...
