Genetic repair strategies inspired by Arabidopsis thaliana

Abstract

Recent advances in genetics controversially suggest that the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana performs genetic repair using genetic information that originates in the individual's grandparent generation. We apply this ancestral genetic repair strategy within an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) to solve a constraint based optimisation problem. Results indicate that the grandparent based genetic repair strategy outperforms the parent alternative. Within this framework, we investigate the impact of storing only the fittest ancestors for use as a repair template. The influence of performing repair in a fixed direction is compared to randomly varying the direction in which error detection proceeds. Finally we explore the impact of varying the direction of repair on the results produced. All results seem to support the non-Mendelian inheritance process suggested by Lolle et al. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.