Widespread Selection Relaxation in Aquatic Mammals
While mammals are predominantly terrestrial, several lineages within them have independently transitioned to aquatic environments and exhibit a great variety of evolutionary …
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While mammals are predominantly terrestrial, several lineages within them have independently transitioned to aquatic environments and exhibit a great variety of evolutionary …
To quantify selection acting on a trait, methods have been developed using either within or between-species variation. However, methods using within-species variation do not …
Models have always been central to inferring molecular evolution and to reconstructing phylogenetic trees. Their use typically involves the development of a mechanistic framework …
Mutations can be beneficial by bringing innovation to their bearer, allowing them to adapt to environmental change. These mutations are typically unpredictable since they respond …
Purifying selection is the most pervasive type of selection, as it constantly removes deleterious mutations arising in populations, directly scaling with population size. Highly …
Adaptation in protein-coding sequences can be detected from multiple sequence alignments across species or alternatively by leveraging polymorphism data within a population. Across …
Phylogenetic codon models are routinely used to characterize selective regimes in coding sequences. Their parametric design, however, is still a matter of debate, in particular …
Evolution is, fundamentally, a tug-of-war around biological diversity in which two main types of opposing processes are involved. Diversity is generated by means of mutation, …
Molecular sequences are shaped by selection, where the strength of selection relative to drift is determined by effective population size ($N_e$). Populations with high $N_e$ are …
Mutation--selection phylogenetic codon models are grounded on population genetics first principles and represent a principled approach for investigating the intricate interplay …
In recent years, codon substitution models based on the mutation--selection principle have been extended for the purpose of detecting signatures of adaptive evolution in …
Molecular evolution aims to characterize the mechanisms at work in the evolution of sequences, governed by a stochastic process whose main components are mutation, selection and …
In humans and many other species, recombination events cluster in narrow and short-lived hot spots distributed across the genome, whose location is determined by the Zn-finger …