Biology subjects

Weissman, D. B.

Publications and source records attributed to Weissman, D. B..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2018

Increased adaptability to rapid environmental change can more than make up for the two-fold cost of males

The famous \"two-fold cost of sex\" is really the cost of anisogamy - why should females mate with males who do not contribute resources to offspring, rather than isogamous partners who contribute equally? In typical anisogamous populations, a single very fit male can have an enormous number of offspring, far larger than is possible for any female or isogamous individual. If the sexual selection on males aligns with the natural selection on females, anisogamy thus allows much more rapid adaptation via super-successful males. We show via simulations that this effect can be sufficient to overcome the two-fold cost and maintain anisogamy against isogamy in populations adapting to environmental change. The key quantity is the variance in male fitness - if this exceeds what is possible in an isogamous population, anisogamous populations can win out in direct competition by adapting faster.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2016

Minimal-assumption inference from population-genomic data

Samples of multiple complete genome sequences contain vast amounts of information about the evolutionary history of populations, much of it in the associations among polymorphisms at different loci. Current methods that take advantage of this linkage information rely on models of recombination and coalescence, limiting the sample sizes and populations that they can analyze. We introduce a method, Minimal-Assumption Genomic Inference of Coalescence (MAGIC), that reconstructs key features of the evolutionary history, including the distribution of coalescence times, by integrating information across genomic length scales without using an explicit model of recombination, demography or selection. Using simulated data, we show that MAGICs performance is comparable to PSMC on single diploid samples generated with standard coalescent and recombination models. More importantly, MAGIC can also analyze arbitrarily large samples and is robust to changes in the coalescent and recombination processes. Using MAGIC, we show that the inferred coalescence time histories of samples of multiple human genomes exhibit inconsistencies with a description in terms of an effective population size based on single-genome data.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2016

Ancestry in adapting, spatially-extended populations

Selective sweeps reduce neutral genetic diversity. In sexual populations, this \"hitchhiking\" effect is thought to be limited to the local genomic region of the sweeping allele. While this is true in panmictic populations, we find that in spatially-extended populations the combined effects of many unlinked sweeps can affect patterns of ancestry (and therefore neutral genetic diversity) across the whole genome. Even low rates of sweeps can be enough to skew the spatial locations of ancestors such that neutral mutations that occur in an individual living outside a small region in the center of the range have virtually no chance of fixing in the population. The fact that nearly all ancestry rapidly traces back to a small spatial region also means that relatedness between individuals falls off very slowly as a function of the spatial distance between them.

evolutionary biology↗