Did you know that genes can mask and alter the effects of other genes? Could this process, called epistasis, be a key to understanding complex conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes?

Jim Manzi has a long post up on epistasis, that is, gene-gene interactions: We could call this process of competing algorithms struggling to find the best solution as fast as possible "meta-evolution" ...

A worthy (so I believe) repost from my other blog.... [begin repost] Several years back David wrote about Sewall Wright's Shifting Balance Theory. If you know much about the history of mathematical ...

Statistical method developed may be used to identify sites of importance for viral adaptation. A group of investigators report developing a new phylogenetic method for detecting epistasis. They ...

Euan Ashley's lab explores the intricate interactions of gene variants. Tiny "typos," or genetic mutations, can sneak into segments of DNA. Many of these are harmless, but some can cause health ...

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), the causal agent of the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, has undergone genomic mutations, which have led to the ...

Abstract: Early‐generation hybrid fitness is difficult to interpret because heterosis can obscure the effects of hybrid breakdown. We used controlled reciprocal crosses and common garden experiments ...

Why evolutionary genetics does not always add up / Edmund D. Brodie III -- Beyond the average : the evolutionary importance of gene interactions and variability of epistatic effects / Patrick C.

We apply new analytical methods to understand the consequences of population bottlenecks for expected additive genetic variance. We analyze essentially all models for multilocus epistasis that have ...

Each week, we answer frequently asked questions about life during the coronavirus crisis. If you have a question you'd like us to consider for a future post, email us at goatsandsoda@npr.org with the ...