Estimating directional epistasis

Estimating directional epistasis

Epistasis, i.e., the fact that gene effects depend on the genetic background, is a direct consequence of the complexity of genetic architectures. Despite this, most of the models used in evolutionary and quantitative genetics pay scant attention to genetic interactions. For instance, the traditional decomposition of genetic effects models epistasis as noise around the evolutionarily-relevant ad...

The Effects of Directional Epistasis on Molecular Evolution By

On epistasis: why it is unimportant in polygenic directional selection.

There is a difference in viewpoint of developmental and evo-devo geneticists versus breeders and students of quantitative evolution. The former are interested in understanding the developmental process; the emphasis is on identifying genes and studying their action and interaction. Typically, the genes have individually large effects and usually show substantial dominance and epistasis. The lat...

Interaction between directional epistasis and average mutational effects.

We investigate the relationship between the average fitness decay due to single mutations and the strength of epistatic interactions in genetic sequences. We observe that epistatic interactions between mutations are correlated to the average fitness decay, both in RNA secondary structure prediction as well as in digital organisms replicating in silico. This correlation implies that, during adap...

Mixture Model for estimating fiber ODF and multi-directional Tractography

Introduction: Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is now a well-established scheme for analyzing neural pathways in the brain by means of streamline or probabilistic tractography. But DTI models the diffusion of water molecules by a Gaussian process, while the data captured by the diffusionweighted MRI (DW-MRI) could very well be non-Gaussian. To overcome this limitation, a High Angular Resolution D...