One question that comes up is how to varroa mites generate variation when they are almost always the product of brother and sister mating. 

A computational biologist looks at how identical cells come to differ.

> My main interest is in understanding how complex biological behaviours are encoded by DNA. An example of such behaviour is the ability of genetically identical cells to generate diversity in their phenotypes, or observable traits, by changing how genes are expressed from one cell to the next. How expression variability occurs over short timescales (for example, during a cell cycle) has been well studied; much less is known about it over longer timescales.

> So I was excited by work from Narendra Maheshri of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and his colleagues. They demonstrate that slow expression fluctuations of a yeast gene are regulated locally, or in cis, by that gene's promoter — a nearby stretch of DNA that regulates the gene's expression.

> Although the mechanistic details of this encoding are still unclear, applying similar approaches to many more promoters should bring us closer to understanding how other complex phenomena are encoded by DNA. This will hopefully allow us to one day predict the phenotypic effects of human genetic variation.

Eran Segal writing in Nature. 18 March 2010

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