Section: New Results

Evolution of genome size

Using the Aevol software, we investigated the dynamics of genome size under different evolutionary pressures (variation of mutation rates and variation of population sizes). The dynamics of the model enabled us to identify a new mutational pressure on genome size that spontaneously increase the fraction of non-coding sequences. We showed that this mutational pressure interact with the selective pressure for robustness (knibbe et al., 2007), resulting in an equilibrium of genome size and non-coding proportion. Moreover, we showed that this equilibrium can change depending on the size of the population due to the resulting effect on selection intensity. A paper has been published in the proceedings of the ALife 2019 conference (cardes et al, 2019) and an article in in preparation.