ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Drift-barrier hypothesis and mutation-rate evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 246 papers.
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246 citing papers in PubMed.
- Ineffectual Genomic Error Correction Under Environmental Perturbation Dynamically Regulates Mutational Supply and Robustness.Journal of molecular evolution · 2026Article
- The rate and spectrum of germline mutations in chicken from a commercial pedigree line.Genetics, selection, evolution : GSE · 2026Article
- Dynamics of mutators of arbitrary dominance in humans.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The highly heterozygous European amphioxus (Branchiostoma lanceolatum) at the edge of panmixia.PLoS genetics · 2026Article
- UV-B-induced DNA repair mechanisms and their effects on mutagenesis and culturability inmSystems · 2026Article
- Flight style and metabolism shape the tempo of genome evolution in birds.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- High Rate of Mutation and Efficient Removal by Selection of Structural Variants From Natural Populations of Caenorhabditis Elegans.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Evolutionary causes and consequences of gene duplication.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2026Review
- Evolution of the highest fidelity DNA replication systems.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Functionality versus Adaptation: Insights from Transcriptional Adaptation.Journal of molecular evolution · 2026Review
- Discovery and Evaluation of Cadmium-Adapted Daphnia pulex Genotypes in a Region of Historical Mining Reveals Adaptation Protects the Germline From Cadmium-Induced Mutations.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Genomic perplexity and the evolution of context-dependent function.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Controlling for life-history traits in vertebrates reveals that effective population size does not affect mutation rate or genome size.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Roles of Mutation, Ploidy, and Recombination in Adaptive Evolution in Two Divergent Model Yeasts.Genes · 2026Review
- Trio-sequencing Reveals High Germline Mutation Rates in the Colorado Potato Beetle (Leptinotarsa decemlineata).Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Genomic perspectives on the inference of evolutionary changes in ecological life-history traits.Quantitative plant biology · 2026Review
- Elevated rates and biased spectra of mutations in anaerobically cultured lactic acid bacteria.mBio · 2025Article
- Lifespan-extending downregulation of insulin signalling reduces germline mutation load.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Structural Mutations Set an Equilibrium Noncoding Genome Fraction.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- A record-setting mitogenome in the holoparasitic plant Balanophora yakushimensis accompanied by exceptional loss of organellar DNA repair and recombination genes.BMC biology · 2025Article
186 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Abstract
Mutation dictates the tempo and mode of evolution, and like all traits, the mutation rate is subject to evolutionary modification. Here, we report refined estimates of the mutation rate for a prokaryote with an exceptionally small genome and for a unicellular eukaryote with a large genome. Combined with prior results, these estimates provide the basis for a potentially unifying explanation for the wide range in mutation rates that exists among organisms. Natural selection appears to reduce the mutation rate of a species to a level that scales negatively with both the effective population size (N(e)), which imposes a drift barrier to the evolution of molecular refinements, and the genomic content of coding DNA, which is proportional to the target size for deleterious mutations. As a consequence of an expansion in genome size, some microbial eukaryotes with large N(e) appear to have evolved mutation rates that are lower than those known to occur in prokaryotes, but multicellular eukaryotes have experienced elevations in the genome-wide deleterious mutation rate because of substantial reductions in N(e).
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