Hot answers tagged theoretical-biology
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TL;DR:
There is a dearth of actual experimental evidence. However:
there is at least one study that confirmed the process ([STUDY #7] - Myxococcus xanthus; by Fiegna and Velicer, 2003).
Another study experimentally confirmed higher extinction risk as well ([STUDY #8] - Paul F. Doherty's study of dimorphic bird species an [STUDY #9] - Denson K. McLain).
...
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There is a recent paper that introduced the first molecular-level whole-cell simulation.
Karr, J.R., Sanghvi, J.C., Macklin, D.N., Gutschow, M.V., Jacobs, J.M., Bolival, B., Assad-Garcia, N., Glass, J.I., & Covert, M.W. (2012). A whole-cell computational model predicts phenotype from genotype. Cell 150:389-401 DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2012.05.044
The ...
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Cat claws are growing all the time, like horse hooves, or human nails. However, cats and horses usually use their claws/hooves, so they get shortened through mechanical action.
An indoor cat may need their claws trimmed if it doesn't use them enough (that's why cats will want to scratch everywhere), or if has supernumerary toes that don't normally touch the ...
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Population dynamics occupies a whole subset of mathematical biology. Perhaps the most pragmatic uses for modelling population dynamics come from the fields of epidemiology for modelling disease infection and transmission through a population (one such article), or ecology modelling things like forestation, fishing dynamics, predator-prey relationships (an ...
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Two previous answers listed many applications of population dynamics models. I want to add that they are also important for conservation of endangered species. For example classical stage-class model (Crouse et al 1987, free copy) indicate that the most effective way to protect sea turtles is reducing mortality of large juveniles.
Moreover, you don't have ...
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Leonardo's already given you an excellent answer, but I thought I'd add my perspective. I'm a mathematical epidemiologist, so I'd at least like to believe these types of models are useful.
For me, there are a number of things population dynamics models are especially useful for:
Highlighting data requirements. Yes, models need data, as you've mentioned. ...
4
The Karr et al. paper attempts to capture most of the details in their model by combining features from the genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome. This work heavily builds off of the coarse-grained models that you ask of especially on the work from Bernhard Palsson from which Markus Covert did his training. The answer to your question rests ...
2
Many years ago I worked in the field of bacterial chemotaxis, and your question brought this paper to mind:
JL Spudich & DE Koshland Jr. (1976) Non-genetic individuality: chance in the single cell. Nature 262:467-471.
The authors report an analysis of the chemotactic behaviour of individual bacterial cells from a single homogeneous culture. They ...
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He defines lineage selection as selection for traits which increase the fitness of a group of plasmids, rather than an individual plasmid with in a cell or a particular cell containing plasmids. He says that the unit of selection are "plasmid-host clades" : in other words the unit of selection is the group of closely related plasmids in separate cells. It is ...
1
Nothing is at a genome-wide local equilibrium. Graham Bell wrote fairly extensively on this (IIRC).
Some loci
will be at what are likely global optimums (e.g. Cytochrome oxidase)
will be at local but not global optimums (e.g. low-fitness malaria resistance vs. high fitness malaria resistance: for the extremely cool story check out this page)
will not ...
1
I may suggest to give a look to game theory based model and their generalization from homogenous spatial diatribution to network like model. An easy review can be found in Martin A. Nowak's Evolutionary Dynamics (Harvard press 2006).
In particular you can see the classical Moran process as an evolutionary graph game going on a complete graph with identical ...
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Relating to your last comment on random fluctuations in survival, a recent theoretical paper by Lee et al. 2011 studies the effect of mating systems on demographic stochasticity in small population. No empirical data there though. Their main conclusion is that polygyny (in relation with sex ratio) can lead to high demographic variance, therefore lowering ...
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