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Register a new userIs territory defence related to plumage ornaments in the king penguin Aptenodytes patagonicus ?
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After Laskar, the Lyapunov time in the solar system is about five millions years (5.000.000 [years]). On the other hand, after Kimura, the evolutionary (phenotypic) rate, for hominids, is 1/5.000.000 [1/years]. Why are these two quantities so closely related? In this work, following a proposition by Finlayson and Hutchings et al, I found an inequality, which relates Lyapunov time and evolution rate. This inequality fits well with some known cases in biological evolution.
In December 2019, COVID-19 were detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China. SARS-CoV-2 rapidly spread to the whole Chinese mainland with the people during the Chinese Spring Festival Travel Rush. As of 19 February 2020, 74576 confirmed cases of COVID-19 had been reported in Chinese Mainland. What kind of cities have more confirmed cases, and is there any relationship between GDP and confirmed cases? In this study, we explored the relationship between the confirmed cases of COVID-19 and GDP at the prefectural-level, found a positive correlation between them. This finding warns high GDP areas should pay more prevention and control efforts when an epidemic outbreak, as they have greater risks than other areas nearby.
Homologous recombination is an important operator in the evolution of biological organisms. However, there is still no clear, generally accepted understanding of why it exists and under what circumstances it is useful. In this paper we consider its utility in the context of an infinite population haploid model with selection and homologous recombination. We define utility in terms of two metrics - the increase in frequency of fit genotypes, and the increase in average population fitness, relative to those associated with selection only. Explicitly, we exhaustively explore the eight-dimensional parameter space of a two-locus two-allele system, showing, as a function of the landscape and the initial population, that recombination is beneficial in terms of our metrics in two distinct regimes: a landscape independent regime - the search regime - where recombination aids in the search for a fit genotype that is absent or at low frequency in the population; and the modular regime, associated with quasi-additive fitness landscapes with low epistasis, where recombination allows for the juxtaposition of fit modules or Building Blocks. Thus, we conclude that the ubiquity and utility of recombination is intimately associated with the existence of modularity in biological fitness landscapes.
We study the dynamics of colonization of a territory by a stochastic population at low immigration pressure. We assume a sufficiently strong Allee effect that introduces, in deterministic theory, a large critical population size for colonization. At low immigration rates, the average pre-colonization population size is small thus invalidating the WKB approximation to the master equation. We circumvent this difficulty by deriving an exact zero-flux solution of the master equation and matching it with an approximate non-zero-flux solution of the pertinent Fokker-Planck equation in a small region around the critical population size. This procedure provides an accurate evaluation of the quasi-stationary probability distribution of population sizes in the pre-colonization state, and of the mean time to colonization, for a wide range of immigration rates. At sufficiently high immigration rates our results agree with WKB results obtained previously. At low immigration rates the results can be very different.
The underlying structure of the canonical amino acid substitution matrix (aaSM) is examined by considering stepwise improvements in the differential recognition of amino acids according to their chemical properties during the branching history of the two aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase (aaRS) superfamilies. The evolutionary expansion of the genetic code is described by a simple parameterization of the aaSM, in which (i) the number of distinguishable amino acid types, (ii) the matrix dimension, and (iii) the number of parameters, each increases by one for each bifurcation in an aaRS phylogeny. Parameterized matrices corresponding to trees in which the size of an amino acid sidechain is the only discernible property behind its categorization as a substrate, exclusively for a Class I or II aaRS, provide a significantly better fit to empirically determined aaSM than trees with random bifurcation patterns. A second split between polar and nonpolar amino acids in each Class effects a vastly greater further improvement. The earliest Class-separated epochs in the phylogenies of the aaRS reflect these enzymes capability to distinguish tRNAs through the recognition of acceptor stem identity elements via the minor (Class I) and major (Class II) helical grooves, which is how the ancient Operational Code functioned. The advent of tRNA recognition using the anticodon loop supports the evolution of the optimal map of amino acid chemistry found in the later Genetic Code, an essentially digital categorization, in which polarity is the major functional property, compensating for the unrefined, haphazard differentiation of amino acids achieved by the Operational Code.
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