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Since the sequencing of large genomes, many statistical features of their sequences have been found. One intriguing feature is that certain subsequences are much more abundant than others. In fact, abundances of subsequences of a given length are distributed with a scale-free power-law tail, resembling properties of human texts, such as the Zipfs law. Despite recent efforts, the understanding of this phenomenon is still lacking. Here we find that selfish DNA elements, such as those belonging to the Alu family of repeats, dominate the power-law tail. Interestingly, for the Alu elements the power-law exponent increases with the length of the considered subsequences. Motivated by these observations, we develop a model of selfish DNA expansion. The predictions of this model qualitatively and quantitatively agree with the empirical observations. This allows us to estimate parameters for the process of selfish DNA spreading in a genome during its evolution. The obtained results shed light on how evolution of selfish DNA elements shapes non-trivial statistical properties of genomes.
Contrary to long-held views, recent evidence indicates that $textit{de novo}$ birth of genes is not only possible, but is surprisingly prevalent: a substantial fraction of eukaryotic genomes are composed of orphan genes, which show no homology with a
Understanding how genotypes map onto phenotypes, fitness, and eventually organisms is arguably the next major missing piece in a fully predictive theory of evolution. We refer to this generally as the problem of the genotype-phenotype map. Though we
Although accumulation of molecular damage is suggested to be an important molecular mechanism of aging, a quantitative link between the dynamics of damage accumulation and mortality of species has so far remained elusive. To address this question, we
The incubation period of a disease is the time between an initiating pathologic event and the onset of symptoms. For typhoid fever, polio, measles, leukemia and many other diseases, the incubation period is highly variable. Some affected people take
Evolutionary game theory has traditionally assumed that all individuals in a population interact with each other between reproduction events. We show that eliminating this restriction by explicitly considering the time scales of interaction and selec