The divergence of two subspecies of common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes troglodytes and P. t. verus) and the bonobo (P. paniscus) was studied using a recently developed method for analyzing population divergence. Under the isolation with migration model, the posterior probability distributions of divergence time, migration rates, and effective population sizes were estimated for large multilocu...

It has been known for a long time that patients suffering from rare diseases following a recessive mode of inheritance are, in a high proportion of cases, offspring of marriages between related partners who themselves are healthy. In such cases varying percentages of 'consanguineous marriages' have been reported. Such figures are useful as a general orientation. The great differences found betw...

The study of evolutionary biology is commonly divided into two components: study of the processes by which evolutionary change occurs and study of the patterns produced by those processes. By “pattern” we mean primarily the pattern of phylogenetic relationships among species or genes. Studies of evolutionary processes often don’t often devote too much attention to evolutionary patterns, except ...

Branching process in random environment (BPRE) are a generalization of GaltonWatson processes where the reproduction law is picked randomly in an i.i.d manner in each generation. In the supercritical case, the population Zn either explodes (with a positive probability) or becomes extincted. We are interested in the event when the process Zn takes positive but bounded values for large times n. W...

A central goal of computational biology is the prediction of phenotype from DNA and protein sequence data. Recent models of sequence change use in silico prediction systems to incorporate the effects of phenotype on evolutionary rates. These models have been designed for analyzing sequence data from different species and have been accompanied by statistical techniques for estimating model param...

T here is a broad consensus that genetic alterations of normal body cells are the basis of cancer progression. Throughout the lifetime of an individual, her or his cells have to divide often, which is associated with occasional genetic changes. Some of the changes lead to uncontrolled cell proliferation and, at later stages of cancer progression, to blood vessel formation in the tumor tissue an...

A strong demographic Allee effect in which the expected population growth rate is negative below a certain critical population size can cause high extinction probabilities in small introduced populations. But many species are repeatedly introduced to the same location and eventually one population may overcome the Allee effect by chance. With the help of stochastic models, we investigate how mu...

Whether and how habitat fragmentation and population size jointly affect adaptive genetic variation and adaptive population differentiation are largely unexplored. Owing to pronounced genetic drift, small, fragmented populations are thought to exhibit reduced adaptive genetic variation relative to large populations. Yet fragmentation is known to increase variability within and among habitats as...

Leporinus elongatus, a fish species widely distributed throughout the Paraná River basin in South America, is an important fishery resource and a valuable species in aquaculture programs. Despite its great economic importance, several wild populations have been suffering a drastic reduction. The comprehension of its population structure represents an important step for the conservation of these...

We study competition between two biological species advected by a compressible velocity field. Individuals are treated as discrete Lagrangian particles that reproduce or die in a density-dependent fashion. In the absence of a velocity field and fitness advantage, number fluctuations lead to a coarsening dynamics typical of the stochastic Fisher equation. We investigate three examples of compres...