Mitochondrial mutations in Caenorhabditis elegans show signatures of oxidative damage and an AT-bias.

ABSTRACT: Rapid mutation rates are typical of mitochondrial genomes (mtDNAs) in animals, but it is not clear why. The difficulty of obtaining measurements of mtDNA mutation that are not biased by natural selection has stymied efforts to distinguish between competing hypotheses about the causes of high mtDNA mutation rates. Several studies which have measured mtDNA mutations in nematodes have yielded small datasets with conflicting conclusions about the relative abundance of different substitution classes (i.e., the mutation spectrum). We therefore leveraged Duplex Sequencing, a high-fidelity DNA sequencing technique, to characterize de novo mtDNA mutations in Caenorhabditis elegans. This approach detected nearly an order of magnitude more mtDNA mutations than documented in any previous nematode muta

SUBMITTER: Waneka G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8633081 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature