JOBIM 2009
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- Christian Gautier
Christian Gautier
Selection and randomness in evolution or selection of randomness in evolution ?
Biological evolution is based upon two processes, one generates genomic diversity (the mutational process) and one acts as a filter on this diversity (the selection process). For about fifty years biologists have addressed the question of the relative role of each of these processes on the patterning of genomes. If one “type” of mutation is particularly frequent, the filter has a higher probability to retain some of them but if a mutation is well “adapted” to the filter, even if it appears unfrequently, it has also a great probability to be retained. It is therefore mathematically difficult to discriminate between “mutational bias” and selective advantage.
Knowledge on the mutational process is quickly increasing with the accumulation of results on the cellular functioning. This process appears more and more complex and is also submitted to biodiversity : all organisms do have not the same mutational bias. Ecology (in a broad sense) has brought many recent results on selection, adaptation, genetic random drift and their relationships even in complexly structured populations. However a synthetic view of these two fields is difficult due to the very different scales both at the level of time (a few days to millions of years) and of biological organisation (molecules v.s. populations and communities). Moreover the results belong to very different biological fields and different biological communities (now in two different CNRS institutes !)
Being neither a cellular biologist nor an ecologist I do not claim that I shall present a new synthetic view of evolution ! The very modest aim of this talk is to explore the potentiality of bioinformatics, and particularly modeling, to help integrate population genetics, phylogeny, molecular evolution, cellular and molecular biology.
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