Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userInferring epistasis from genomic data with comparable mutation and outcrossing rate
373
0
0.0
(
0
)
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
We consider a population evolving due to mutation, selection and recombination, where selection includes single-locus terms (additive fitness) and two-loci terms (pairwise epistatic fitness). We further consider the problem of inferring fitness in the evolutionary dynamics from one or several snap-shots of the distribution of genotypes in the population. In the recent literature this has been done by applying the Quasi-Linkage Equilibrium (QLE) regime first obtained by Kimura in the limit of high recombination. Here we show that the approach also works in the interesting regime where the effects of mutations are comparable to or larger than recombination. This leads to a modified main epistatic fitness inference formula where the rates of mutation and recombination occur together. We also derive this formula using by a previously developed Gaussian closure that formally remains valid when recombination is absent. The findings are validated through numerical simulations.
rate research
Read More
The inverse Potts problem to infer a Boltzmann distribution for homologous protein sequences from their single-site and pairwise amino acid frequencies recently attracts a great deal of attention in the studies of protein structure and evolution. We study regularization and learning methods and how to tune regularization parameters to correctly infer interactions in Boltzmann machine learning. Using $L_2$ regularization for fields, group $L_1$ for couplings is shown to be very effective for sparse couplings in comparison with $L_2$ and $L_1$. Two regularization parameters are tuned to yield equal values for both the sample and ensemble averages of evolutionary energy. Both averages smoothly change and converge, but their learning profiles are very different between learning methods. The Adam method is modified to make stepsize proportional to the gradient for sparse couplings and to use a soft-thresholding function for group $L_1$. It is shown by first inferring interactions from protein sequences and then from Monte Carlo samples that the fields and couplings can be well recovered, but that recovering the pairwise correlations in the resolution of a total energy is harder for the natural proteins than for the protein-like sequences. Selective temperature for folding/structural constrains in protein evolution is also estimated.
Inference with population genetic data usually treats the population pedigree as a nuisance parameter, the unobserved product of a past history of random mating. However, the history of genetic relationships in a given population is a fixed, unobserved object, and so an alternative approach is to treat this network of relationships as a complex object we wish to learn about, by observing how genomes have been noisily passed down through it. This paper explores this point of view, showing how to translate questions about population genetic data into calculations with a Poisson process of mutations on all ancestral genomes. This method is applied to give a robust interpretation to the $f_4$ statistic used to identify admixture, and to design a new statistic that measures covariances in mean times to most recent common ancestor between two pairs of sequences. The method more generally interprets population genetic statistics in terms of sums of specific functions over ancestral genomes, thereby providing concrete, broadly interpretable interpretations for these statistics. This provides a method for describing demographic history without simplified demographic models. More generally, it brings into focus the population pedigree, which is averaged over in model-based demographic inference.
The complementary strands of DNA molecules can be separated when stretched apart by a force; the unzipping signal is correlated to the base content of the sequence but is affected by thermal and instrumental noise. We consider here the ideal case where opening events are known to a very good time resolution (very large bandwidth), and study how the sequence can be reconstructed from the unzipping data. Our approach relies on the use of statistical Bayesian inference and of Viterbi decoding algorithm. Performances are studied numerically on Monte Carlo generated data, and analytically. We show how multiple unzippings of the same molecule may be exploited to improve the quality of the prediction, and calculate analytically the number of required unzippings as a function of the bandwidth, the sequence content, the elasticity parameters of the unzipped strands.
One of the outstanding challenges in comparative genomics is to interpret the evolutionary importance of regulatory variation between species. Rigorous molecular evolution-based methods to infer evidence for natural selection from expression data are at a premium in the field, and to date, phylogenetic approaches have not been well-suited to address the question in the small sets of taxa profiled in standard surveys of gene expression. We have developed a strategy to infer evolutionary histories from expression profiles by analyzing suites of genes of common function. In a manner conceptually similar to molecular evolution models in which the evolutionary rates of DNA sequence at multiple loci follow a gamma distribution, we modeled expression of the genes of an emph{a priori}-defined pathway with rates drawn from an inverse gamma distribution. We then developed a fitting strategy to infer the parameters of this distribution from expression measurements, and to identify gene groups whose expression patterns were consistent with evolutionary constraint or rapid evolution in particular species. Simulations confirmed the power and accuracy of our inference method. As an experimental testbed for our approach, we generated and analyzed transcriptional profiles of four emph{Saccharomyces} yeasts. The results revealed pathways with signatures of constrained and accelerated regulatory evolution in individual yeasts and across the phylogeny, highlighting the prevalence of pathway-level expression change during the divergence of yeast species. We anticipate that our pathway-based phylogenetic approach will be of broad utility in the search to understand the evolutionary relevance of regulatory change.
Contact-tracing is an essential tool in order to mitigate the impact of pandemic such as the COVID-19. In order to achieve efficient and scalable contact-tracing in real time, digital devices can play an important role. While a lot of attention has been paid to analyzing the privacy and ethical risks of the associated mobile applications, so far much less research has been devoted to optimizing their performance and assessing their impact on the mitigation of the epidemic. We develop Bayesian inference methods to estimate the risk that an individual is infected. This inference is based on the list of his recent contacts and their own risk levels, as well as personal information such as results of tests or presence of syndromes. We propose to use probabilistic risk estimation in order to optimize testing and quarantining strategies for the control of an epidemic. Our results show that in some range of epidemic spreading (typically when the manual tracing of all contacts of infected people becomes practically impossible, but before the fraction of infected people reaches the scale where a lock-down becomes unavoidable), this inference of individuals at risk could be an efficient way to mitigate the epidemic. Our approaches translate into fully distributed algorithms that only require communication between individuals who have recently been in contact. Such communication may be encrypted and anonymized and thus compatible with privacy preserving standards. We conclude that probabilistic risk estimation is capable to enhance performance of digital contact tracing and should be considered in the currently developed mobile applications.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
