Background: Reproductive isolation can result from adaptive processes (e.g., ecological speciation and mutation-order speciation) or stochastic processes such as "system drift" model. Ecological speciation predicts barriers to gene flow between populations ...
The arms race between viruses and their hosts shaped the evolutionary history and the genome composition of both parties. Restriction factors are the first-line antiviral effectors encoded by the host genomes and are often conserved through evolution to pr ...
Long-term consumption of lipid-rich foods can contribute to common metabolic diseases and systemic low-grade inflammation. However, dietary responses and the development of non-communicable diseases are shaped by genetic factors and gene-by-environment int ...
Introduction: We have reanalyzed the genomic data of the International Collaboration for the Genomics of HIV (ICGH), centering on HIV-1 Elite Controllers.Methods: We performed a genome-wide Association Study comparing 543 HIV Elite Controllers with 3,272 u ...
An individual polygenic risk score was associated with osteoporosis in people living with HIV. The genetic effect was robust, as it persisted after multivariable adjustment for established traditional and HIV-related osteoporosis risk factors, including te ...
Hosts and pathogens are involved in a long-standing evolutionary arms race characterized by successive rounds of evolution. Specifically, while hosts evolve resistance against infections, pathogens adapt to re-establish virulence. Since the signatures of t ...
Mutations to gene regulatory networks can be maladaptive or a source of evolutionary novelty. Epistasis con-founds our understanding of how mutations affect the expression patterns of gene regulatory networks, a chal-lenge exacerbated by the dependence of ...
Understanding how biological matter takes its shape is instrumental to biology, bioengineering, medicine, and bioinspired engineering. Gaining information on the principles of morphogenesis could enable clinicians to correct developmental abnormalities, ev ...
Leukocyte count is associated with coronary artery disease (CAD) events in the general population. Here we show that leukocytes are independently associated with CAD events in people with HIV in Switzerland, after adjusting for traditional and HIVrelated r ...
The resilience of the mitochondrial genome (mtDNA) to a high mutational pressure depends, in part, on negative purifying selection in the germline. A paradigm in the field has been that such selection, at least in part, takes place in primordial germ cells ...
Owing to stochastic fluctuations arising from finite population size, known as genetic drift, the ability of a population to explore a rugged fitness landscape depends on its size. In the weak mutation regime, while the mean steady-state fitness increases ...
Characterizing the genetic structure of large cohorts has become increasingly important as genetic studies extend to massive, increasingly diverse biobanks. Popular methods decompose individual genomes into fractional cluster assignments with each cluster ...
The study of insular populations was key in the development of evolutionary theory. The successful colonisation of an island depends on the geographic context, and specific characteristics of the organism and the island, but also on stochastic processes. A ...
The Montecristo wild goat is an endangered feral population that has been on the homonymous island in the Tuscan Archipelago since ancient times. The origins of Montecristo goats are still debated, with authors dating their introduction either back to Neol ...
Evolutionary diversity in species can arise in many ways, including local adaptation. Despite the global importance of tropical forest ecosystems, few studies have explored patterns of local adaptation in tropical tree species. We investigated population g ...
The estimation of genetic clusters using genomic data has application from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to demographic history to polygenic risk scores (PRS) and is expected to play an important role in the analyses of increasingly diverse, large ...
Contemporary genomic approaches allow us to seek answers to biological questions that were previously out of reach. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous genetic polymorphisms associated with human diseases, providing new insight ...
Set-point viral load (SPVL), a common measure of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-1 virulence, is partially determined by viral genotype. Epidemiological evidence suggests that this viral property has been under stabilising selection, with a typical opti ...
In the early 2000s, the SADS, an extensive linguistic atlas project, surveyed more than three thousand individuals across German-speaking Switzerland on over two hundred linguistic variants, capturing the morphosyntactic variation in Swiss German. In this ...
The hypothesis that the evolution of humans involves hybridization between diverged species has been actively debated in recent years. We present the following novel evidence in support of this hypothesis: the analysis of nuclear pseudogenes of mtDNA ("NUM ...