The divergence of mutation rates and spectra across the Tree of Life.

ABSTRACT: Owing to advances in genome sequencing, genome stability has become one of the most scrutinized cellular traits across the Tree of Life. Despite its centrality to all things biological, the mutation rate (per nucleotide site per generation) ranges over three orders of magnitude among species and several-fold within individual phylogenetic lineages. Within all major organismal groups, mutation rates scale negatively with the effective population size of a species and with the amount of functional DNA in the genome. This relationship is most parsimoniously explained by the drift-barrier hypothesis, which postulates that natural selection typically operates to reduce mutation rates until further improvement is thwarted by the power of random genetic drift. Despite this constraint, the molecul

SUBMITTER: Lynch M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10561183 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature