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Short
Introduction
Help uncover genetic causes for extinction of species with evolution@home
simulators under MacOS and Windows
You have been caring
about endangered species? You are generally interested in evolution
of life on earth? You are a specialist for the evolution of sex?
Then you will want to download
the current simulator of evolution@home. It allows your computer
to do meaningful evolutionary research while you have a cup of coffee
or enjoy the weekend.
This first simulator
targets a phenomenon known from population genetics: Muller's ratchet
in asexual populations. It describes the stochastic accumulation
of slightly deleterious mutations in genomes over evolutionary time.
If this happens in a species, it might be driven to extinction not
due to environmental, but due to genetic reasons: the best genomes
available become increasingly contaminated by mutations that are
harmless, if rare, but dangerous, if frequent in a genome. Of course
Muller's ratchet does not click everywhere. Evolutionary geneticists
have been trying to predict the rate (and thus long-term effects)
of the ratchet for more than 25 years now. They found this problem
to be very resistant against comprehensive analytic solutions. In
the mean time some predictions can be made with good accuracy.
However, large ranges of parameter space are still hard to tackle,
especially if small steps towards more realistic conditions are
made.
This is where the current
simulator comes in: by systematically scanning parameter space
we will understand more about Muller's ratchet. Once results are
submitted, they are added to the growing database with thousands
of simulation results worth many CPU years. Eventually, this database
will be published. It will help biologists to easily estimate the
effects of Muller's ratchet for the organisms they work with every
day - without having to understand all the technical details of
the predictions. This database will also help theoretical population
geneticists to develop better predictions of Muller's ratchet by
comparing their theories with a large collection of simulation results.
Finally, comparing the data from these parameter space searches
with the parameters found in biology, will help estimate the extent
to which genomic decay by Muller's ratchet indeed does contribute
to the extinction of species. To understand it, is essential for
fighting it.
The current simulator
that allows you to participate in this adventure is now available
in a semi-automated
version for various flavours of MacOS and Windows. As starting
the project had a higher priority than implementing full automatization,
the simulator-software comes as a console application that only
writes and reads to the folder it is located in. This means that
you have to provide the input (in form of a run-file
you can download) and you have to submit the results (in form of
an automatically generated results-file emailed as an attachment
to a specific
address). However, the amount of manual work is minimal, especially
if you choose run-files that run for weeks or longer. Detailed instructions
are included with the simulator.
Besides having your
computer run continously when you would normally switch it off,
there are no hidden costs if you want to participate (no automatic
data-intensive dial-in connections to the Internet). You can continue
with your daily work under Windows as usual, since the simulator
uses only CPU cycles not needed by normal applications. Under MacOS
slowdown is only rarely noticed and can be easily prevented by stopping
the simulator temporarily.
What do you gain?
We can not offer you to pay for your contribution or give you the
chance to win 1000$, as this is a non-profit research project. (If
you want money, go to one of the other
global distributed computing projects that do it, but be warned:
not many people have become rich that way.) However, we do invite
you to personalize the results you compute. Thus you will get an
entry in the high scores lists that will be published (including
the possibility to set a link to your home page). However, most
interesting will be the fact that you help mankind to understand
a part of the causes that threaten so many species on our planet.
Thereby, you become part of those who do something to save lifes.
So, make up your mind
and join
us in the adventure
of searching for the mysteries of the evolution of life on planet
earth.
A
big thank you to all participants of the first hour!
Thank you to all who
submitted results to evolution@home
despite the tedious manual interactions necessary at the moment.
Your help is very much appreciated. Your results reach their destination.
They are needed and this will continue to be so, even if this website
is updated only every once in a while. It will still take quite
some time to implement a fully-automated high-scores-analysis system
for immediate feedback and even more time to implement fully automated
simulators. While evolution@home is heading for that direction,
no precise roadmaps can be presented now.
Until the transition to full automation, you may want to choose
run-files with long computing times. This minimizes the amount of
manual work and addresses more interesting parameter combinations.
Do not care about repeated or incomplete simulations. The simulator
and the analysis system are designed to handle these correctly.
Your help in this early phase of evolution@home is appreciated very
much, so please do not get discouraged by the lack of a cool graphical
user interface or some other missing features. They will follow
over the next years.
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