The rapid evolution of drug resistance remains a critical public health concern. The treatment of influenza A virus (IAV) has proven particularly challenging, due to the ability of the virus to develop resistance against current antivirals and vaccines. Here, we evaluate a novel antiviral drug therapy, favipiravir, for which the mechanism of action in IAV involves an interaction with the viral ...

Genomic traits such as codon usage and the lengths of noncoding sequences may be subject to stabilizing selection rather than purifying selection. Mutations affecting these traits are often biased in one direction. To investigate the potential role of stabilizing selection on genomic traits, the effects of mutational bias on the equilibrium value of a trait under stabilizing selection in a fini...

We have found that the effective survival time of amino acids in organisms follows a power law with respect to frequency of their occurrence in genes. We have used mutation data matrix PAM1 PET91 to calculate selection pressure on each kind of amino acid. The results have been compared to MPM1 matrix (Mutation Probability Matrix) representing the pure mutational pressure in the Borrelia burgdor...

We sampled vole populations in Ukraine with the dual goal of characterizing population diversity and of providing a biogeographic perspective to evaluate experimental designs used for previous studies. Our data indicate that genetic diversity in bank vole populations is widely variable across regions and that diversity estimates in contaminated sites are unremarkable compared to those in uncont...

We review recent advances in the understanding of the mutation-selection balance of asexual replicators. For over 30 years, population geneticists thought that an expression derived by Kimura and Maruyama in 1966 fully solved this problem. However, Kimura and Maruyama's result is only correct in the absence of neutral mutations. The inclusion of neutral mutations leads to a wealth of interestin...

We argue that in animal mitochondria codon reassignments, such as those for AGA and AGG from arginine to serine or of AUA from isoleucine to methionine, are the result of an interplay between biased mutational forces and selective ones. In particular, there is a marked tendency for animal mitochondria to have very small genomes and to minimize their investment in components required for gene ex...

Hhighly efficient and reliable sealing technology is essential to improve the efficiency of precooled aeroengines. To explore effects large ambient temperature gradients on performance, thermo-hydrodynamic characteristics a supercritical helium spiral-grooved face seal were studied numerically, under low-temperature conditions. Considering real gas effect helium, thermal deformations analyzed d...