The DOI matches its Crossref record; 29 of the 29 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
High genomic deleterious mutation rates in hominids
Open accessAbstract
It has been suggested that humans may suffer a high genomic deleterious mutation rate,. Here we test this hypothesis by applying a variant of a molecular approach to estimate the deleterious mutation rate in hominids from the level of selective constraint in DNA sequences. Under conservative assumptions, we estimate that an average of 4.2 amino-acid-altering mutations per diploid per generation have occurred in the human lineage since humans separated from chimpanzees. Of these mutations, we estimate that at least 38% have been eliminated by natural selection, indicating that there have been more than 1.6 new deleterious mutations per diploid genome per generation. Thus, the deleterious mutation rate specific to protein-coding sequences alone is close to the upper limit tolerable by a species such as humans that has a low reproductive rate, indicating that the effects of deleterious mutations may have combined synergistically. Furthermore, the level of selective constraint in hominid protein-coding sequences is atypically low. A large number of slightly deleterious mutations may therefore have become fixed in hominid lineages.
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Metadata
- Authors
- Eyre-Walker, A., & Keightley, P. D.
- Venue
- Nature
- Published
- 1999-01
- Volume
- 397
- Issue
- 6717
- Pages
- 344-347
- ISSN
- 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4687
- OpenAlex
- W1502061430
- Cited by
- 398
- References
- 29
- FWCI
- 17.22
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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