Are Nonsynonymous Transversions Generally More Deleterious than Nonsynonymous Transitions?

ABSTRACT: It has been suggested that, due to the structure of the genetic code, nonsynonymous transitions are less likely than transversions to cause radical changes in amino acid physicochemical properties so are on average less deleterious. This view was supported by some but not all mutagenesis experiments. Because laboratory measures of fitness effects have limited sensitivities and relative frequencies of different mutations in mutagenesis studies may not match those in nature, we here revisit this issue using comparative genomics. We extend the standard codon model of sequence evolution by adding the parameter η that quantifies the ratio of the fixation probability of transitional nonsynonymous mutations to that of transversional nonsynonymous mutations. We then estimate η from the concatenate

SUBMITTER: Zou Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7783172 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature