Neutral Theory, Disease Mutations, and Personal Exomes

Exomes, Proteins, and Cardiovascular Disease

The postgenomic era has simultaneously provided huge opportunities and major challenges in the translation of the wealth of genetic information to improve our diagnostic and therapeutic approach to disease. Although many might agree that genome-wide association studies have not met expectations in their ability to capture the full genetic architecture of many medical conditions, there is hope t...

Neutral Mutations and Repetitive

We have previously shown that computer simulations of processes that generate selectively advantageous changes together with random duplications and deletions give rise to genomes with many different genes embedded in a large amount of dispensable DNA sequence. We now explore the consequences of neutral changes on the evolution of genomes. We follow the consequences of sequence divergences that...

Neutral mutations and neutral substitutions in bacterial genomes.

Molecular evolutionary biologists usually assess the underlying spectrum of mutations within a bacterial genome by examining substitutions that occur at sites believed to be under no selective constraints. Alternatively, bacterial mutation rates can also be estimated in a variety of experimental systems. The two classes of changes occurring in DNA sequences-i.e., mutations and neutral substitut...

Genetic Mutations that Cause Coronary Artery Disease

Birth and death processes with neutral mutations

In this paper, we review recent results of ours concerning branching processes with general lifetimes and neutral mutations, under the infinitely many alleles model, where mutations can occur either at birth of particles or at a constant rate during their lives. In both models, we study the allelic partition of the population at time t. We give closed-form formulae for the expected frequency sp...