2018/01/11 by Qijun He, Fenix W. D. Huang, He, Qijun +5
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #05A99 #CRISPR and Genetic Engineering #Combinatorics (math.CO) #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Mathematics #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE) #RNA and protein synthesis mechanisms #RNA modifications and cancer
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1801.05056
openalex publication_date 2018/01/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Genetic robustness, the preservation of evolved phenotypes against genotypic mutations, is one of the central concepts in evolution. In recent years a large body of work has focused on the origins, mechanisms, and consequences of robustness in a wide range of biological systems. In particular, research on ncRNAs studied the ability of sequences to maintain folded structures against single-point mutations. In these studies, the structure is merely a reference. However, recent work revealed evidence that structure itself contributes to the genetic robustness of ncRNAs. We follow this line of thought and consider sequence-structure pairs as the unit of evolution and introduce the spectrum of inverse folding rates (IFR-spectrum) as a measurement of genetic robustness. Our analysis of the miRNA let-7 family captures key features of structure-modulated evolution and facilitates the study of robustness against multiple-point mutations.