Low Base-Substitution Mutation Rate in the Germline Genome of the Ciliate Tetrahymena thermophil.

ABSTRACT: Mutation is the ultimate source of all genetic variation and is, therefore, central to evolutionary change. Previous work on Paramecium tetraurelia found an unusually low germline base-substitution mutation rate in this ciliate. Here, we tested the generality of this result among ciliates using Tetrahymena thermophila. We sequenced the genomes of 10 lines of T. thermophila that had each undergone approximately 1,000 generations of mutation accumulation (MA). We applied an existing mutation-calling pipeline and developed a new probabilistic mutation detection approach that directly models the design of an MA experiment and accommodates the noise introduced by mismapped reads. Our probabilistic mutation-calling method provides a straightforward way of estimating the number of sites at which

SUBMITTER: Long H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5585995 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature