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Abstract

It is a well-known fact that genetic sequences may contain sections with repeated units, called repeats, that differ in length over a population, with a length distribution of geometric type. A simple class of recombination models with single crossovers is analysed that result in equilibrium distributions of this type. Due to the nonlinear and infinite-dimensional nature of these models, their analysis requires some nontrivial tools from measure theory and functional analysis, which makes them interesting also from a mathematical point of view. In particular, they can be viewed as quadratic, hence nonlinear, analogues of Markov chains.