Accelerated rates of large-scale mutations in the presence of copper and nickel.

ABSTRACT: Mutation rate variation has been under intense investigation for decades. Despite these efforts, little is known about the extent to which environmental stressors accelerate mutation rates and influence the genetic load of populations. Moreover, most studies on stressors have focused on unicellular organisms and point mutations rather than large-scale deletions and duplications (copy number variations [CNVs]). We estimated mutation rates in Daphnia pulex exposed to low levels of environmental stressors as well as the effect of selection on de novo mutations. We conducted a mutation accumulation (MA) experiment in which selection was minimized, coupled with an experiment in which a population was propagated under competitive conditions in a benign environment. After an average of 103

SUBMITTER: Chain FJJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6314161 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature