Publication highlights

Go inside our research

Explore a selection of research case studies from the past five years.

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Researchers at the Crick are tackling the big questions about human health and disease, and new findings are published every week.

Our faculty have picked some of the most significant papers published by Crick scientists, all of which are freely available thanks to our open science policy.

Example gene networks

How evolution rewires gene circuits to build new patterns

Gene regulatory networks play a central role in shaping spatial patterns: the lines that eventually give rise to segments, organs or markings like stripes and spots. Researchers at the Crick explored whether specific types of mutations in patterning networks accelerate the evolution of new patterns, and if any of these changes yield predictable evolutionary outcomes. Using a computer simulation that models how small networks of genes evolve under natural selection, they found that adjusting an existing boundary needed only small tweaks to the strengths of existing gene interactions. But creating new boundaries was far more difficult, demanding multiple changes at once. They also found that certain mutations radically shift the predicted evolutionary outcome, suggesting that a mutation introduces a fork in the road early on which reliably redirects evolution to a specific destination.

Gene network organization, mutation, and selection collectively drive developmental pattern evolvability and predictability

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Published in PRX Life

Published

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Selection for size control drives the evolution of molecular motors

How new traits can emerge in evolution has puzzled biologists since Darwin, partly because selection can act only on already existing features. In particular, our understanding of how several new attributes necessary for complex biological mechanisms jointly emerge during evolution is limited. Furthermore, the role of physics in determining fitness and the trajectory of evolution has been largely missed in theoretical models of evolution.

In this work, we tackle these challenges by investigating how natural selection can lead to the evolution of ‘molecular motors’: groups of molecules that can generate motion in one direction. Our simulations show that the selection for an average size in a collection of molecular assembly, a string of molecules, leads to treadmilling, where growth at one end is exactly compensated by shrinkage at the opposite end. Our findings show that physical constraints imposed on molecular self-assembly determines evolutionary dynamics and can lead to the emergence of complex functions.

Selection for size in molecular self-assembly drives the De Novo evolution of a molecular machine

Published in Physical Review Letters

Published

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Research case studies 

Explore a selection of recent case studies that spotlight particular areas of research at the Crick.