TY - JOUR
AU - Markovitch, Omer
AB - Background: The quasispecies model refers to information carriers that undergo self-replication with errors. A quasispecies is a steady-state population of biopolymer sequence variants generated by mutations from a master sequence. A quasispecies error threshold is a minimal replication accuracy below which the population structure breaks down. Theory and experimentation of this model often refer to biopolymers, e.g. RNA molecules or viral genomes, while its prebiotic context is often associated with an RNA world scenario. Here, we study the possibility that compositional entities which code for compositional information, intrinsically different from biopolymers coding for sequential information, could show quasispecies dynamics. Results: We employed a chemistry-based model, graded autocatalysis replication domain (GARD), which simulates the network dynamics within compositional molecular assemblies. In GARD, a compotype represents a population of similar assemblies that constitute a quasi-stationary state in compositional space. A compotype's center-of-mass is found to be analogous to a master sequence for a sequential quasispecies. Using single-cycle GARD dynamics, we measured the quasispecies transition matrix (Q) for the probabilities of transition from one center-of-mass Euclidean distance to another. Similarly, the quasispecies’ growth rate vector (A) was obtained. This allowed computing a steady state distribution of distances to the center of mass, 
TI - Quasispecies in population of compositional assemblies
JF - BMC Evolutionary Biology
DO - 10.1186/s12862-014-0265-1
DA - 2014-12-30
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/springer-journals/quasispecies-in-population-of-compositional-assemblies-IN602LZ0sV
SP - 1
EP - 11
VL - 14
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -