Commentary Cellscience Reviews Vol 3 No 4 ISSN 1742-8130

Divining God's mutation rate

The total genomic mutation rate (µ) and the deleterious mutation rate ( U ), are of fundamental importance to a number of areas of biology, including the classic evolutionary conundrum: why sex? Unfortunately, both µ and U have historically proven extremely difficult to measure accurately. A recent study by Haag-Liautard et al. (1) combines traditional experimental ’mutation accumulation’ methods with whole-genome mutation screening to estimate µ and U in D. melanogaster. The high average value of U (∼1.2) suggests that deleterious mutations may play an important role in the maintenance of sexual reproduction. Interestingly, the overall mutation rate µ varied significantly among starting genotypes, reinforcing the idea that the mutation rate itself may potentially be fine-tuned by natural selection. An analogous study in the nematode C. elegans reported a similar value of U (2), consistent with the suggestion that the deleterious mutation rate has evolved close to a global optimum value (42). The imminent availability of extremely high-throughput DNA sequencing promises to allow biologists to understand global and local factors underlying ’the’ mutation rate.

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