Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 340

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 46 of the 46 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

A direct characterization of human mutation based on microsatellites

Open access
Sun, James X, Helgason, Agnar, Masson, Gisli, Ebenesersdóttir, Sigríður Sunna, Li, Heng, Mallick, Swapan, Gnerre, Sante, Patterson, Nick, Kong, Augustine, Reich, David, Stefansson, Kari·2012·Nature Genetics

Abstract

Mutations are the raw material of evolution but have been difficult to study directly. We report the largest study of new mutations to date, comprising 2,058 germline changes discovered by analyzing 85,289 Icelanders at 2,477 microsatellites. The paternal-to-maternal mutation rate ratio is 3.3, and the rate in fathers doubles from age 20 to 58, whereas there is no association with age in mothers. Longer microsatellite alleles are more mutagenic and tend to decrease in length, whereas the opposite is seen for shorter alleles. We use these empirical observations to build a model that we apply to individuals for whom we have both genome sequence and microsatellite data, allowing us to estimate key parameters of evolution without calibration to the fossil record. We infer that the sequence mutation rate is 1.4–2.3 × 10−8 mutations per base pair per generation (90% credible interval) and that human-chimpanzee speciation occurred 3.7–6.6 million years ago.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1038/ng.2398

Cites

46 of 46 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 46 references

Cited by

See all 340

Metadata

Authors
Sun, J. X., Helgason, A., Masson, G., Ebenesersdóttir, S. S., Li, H., Mallick, S., Gnerre, S., Patterson, N., Kong, A., Reich, D., & Stefansson, K.
Venue
Nature Genetics
Published
2012-08-23
Volume
44
Issue
10
Pages
1161-1165
ISSN
  • 1061-4036 (ISSN-L)
  • 1546-1718
OpenAlex
W2102406302
Cited by
340
References
46
FWCI
19.84
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A direct characterization of human mutation based on microsatellites. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/ng.2398
The paper
Sun, J. X., Helgason, A., Masson, G., Ebenesersdóttir, S. S., Li, H., Mallick, S., Gnerre, S., Patterson, N., Kong, A., Reich, D., & Stefansson, K. (2012). A direct characterization of human mutation based on microsatellites. Nature Genetics. https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.2398

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.