Evolution of the mutation rate

By Michael Lynch. Trends in Genetics, 2010

1,068 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Understanding the mechanisms of evolution requires information on the rate of appearance of new mutations and their effects at the molecular and phenotypic levels. Although procuring such data has been technically challenging, high-throughput genome sequencing is rapidly expanding knowledge in this area. With information on spontaneous mutations now available in a variety of organisms, general patterns have emerged for the scaling of the mutation rate with genome size and for the likely mechanisms driving this pattern. Support is presented for the hypothesis that natural selection pushes mutation rates down to a lower limit set by the power of random genetic drift rather than by intrinsic physiological limitations, and that this has resulted in reduced levels of replication, transcription, and translation fidelity in eukaryotes relative to prokaryotes.

Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c3d184a0cf9bcc6dba867590f3154e90db07bfde

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Citations in the corpus

Spontaneous epigenetic variation in the Arabidopsis thaliana methylome (2011, background): “New sequencing technologies have recently enabled the direct determination of spontaneous DNA mutation rate”
Tissue-specific mutation accumulation in human adult stem cells during life (2016, neutral): “This demonstrates that genome-wide mutation rates and spectra cannot be reliably estimated using mutation discovery in reporter genes 16 , such as the T-lymphocyte HPRT cloning assay 17 , or by deep sequencing of genic regions 18–21 .”
The origin and evolution of mutations in Acute Myeloid Leukemia (2012, neutral): “53 10 (9), depending on cell type (germ cells have the highest fidelity, and cells grown in tissue culture have the lowest) (Gundry and Vijg, 2012; Lynch, 2010).”
Choosing Mutation and Crossover Ratios for Genetic Algorithms - A Review with a New Dynamic Approach (2019, background): “The purpose of mutation is to prevent the GA from converging to local optima, but if it occurs very often, GA is changed to random search [38,44].”
The mitonuclear compatibility species concept (2017, background): “Mitochondrial genes are subject to a high mutation rate (Ballard and Whitlock 2004, Lynch 2010).”
Variation in genome-wide mutation rates within and between human families (2011, background): “, and by considering more recent (and slightly lower) robust genome-wide estimates of sequence divergenc”
The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution (2011, background): “In the case of the mutation rates, the simple non-adaptive population genetic theory seems to explain the observed values with reasonable accuracy (Lynch, 2010).”
Mechanisms of viral mutation (2016, background): “A general inverse correlation between genome size and mutation rate applies to DNA-based microorganisms including viruses, bacteria and unicellular eukaryotes [28].”