ArticleMolecular biology and evolution2016
On the Causes of Evolutionary Transition:Transversion Bias.
Article in Molecular biology and evolution, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 64 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
64 citing papers in PubMed.
- Intragenomic and Interspecific Polymorphism of 35S rDNA Internal Transcribed Spacer 1 (ITS1) inInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2026Article
- Transition-Transversion Bias at theEcology and evolution · 2026Article
- Evolutionary causes and consequences of gene duplication.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2026Review
- Narrowed host ranges do not constrain future host range expansion in RNA phage Φ6.Journal of virology · 2026Article
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of the Black-Footed Cat: Insights intobioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Tracing Genetic Images Formed During Evolution.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Article
- Comparative analysis of the organization and complexity of immunoglobulin light chain loci in equids.Journal of animal science · 2026Article
- Performance of Allplex™ MG & AziR Assay for Detecting Macrolide-ResistantJournal of Korean medical science · 2025Article
- Convergent Evolution and the Epigenome.Epigenomes · 2025Review
- GnT Motifs Can Increase T:A→G:C Mutation Rates Over 1000-fold in Bacteria.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Nuclear genome assembly of Leucinodes orbonalis (Lepidoptera: Crambidae) collected from the Philippines.Journal of insect science (Online) · 2025Article
- Whole genome sequencing and assembly of the house sparrow,GigaByte (Hong Kong, China) · 2025Article
- Genome resequencing and genome-wide polymorphisms in mosquito vectors Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus from south India.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Duplex Real-Time Fluorescent Quantitative PCR Assays for the Detection of Toxigenic Microcystis Genotypes Based on SNP/InDel Variation in mcy Gene Cluster.Current microbiology · 2024Article
- NeMu: a comprehensive pipeline for accurate reconstruction of neutral mutation spectra from evolutionary data.Nucleic acids research · 2024Article
- Mutations in Glycosyltransferases and Glycosidases: Implications for Associated Diseases.Biomolecules · 2024Article
- Article
- Identification and high-throughput genotyping of single nucleotide polymorphism markers in a non-model conifer (Abies nordmanniana (Steven) Spach).Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Genetic Analysis Based on MitochondrialGenes · 2023Article
- Mutation bias and adaptation in bacteria.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2023Review
4 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A pattern in which nucleotide transitions are favored several fold over transversions is common in molecular evolution. When this pattern occurs among amino acid replacements, explanations often invoke an effect of selection, on the grounds that transitions are more conservative in their effects on proteins. However, the underlying hypothesis of conservative transitions has never been tested directly. Here we assess support for this hypothesis using direct evidence: the fitness effects of mutations in actual proteins measured via individual or paired growth experiments. We assembled data from 8 published studies, ranging in size from 24 to 757 single-nucleotide mutations that change an amino acid. Every study has the statistical power to reveal significant effects of amino acid exchangeability, and most studies have the power to discern a binary conservative-vs-radical distinction. However, only one study suggests that transitions are significantly more conservative than transversions. In the combined set of 1,239 replacements (544 transitions, 695 transversions), the chance that a transition is more conservative than a transversion is 53 % (95 % confidence interval 50 to 56) compared with the null expectation of 50 %. We show that this effect is not large compared with that of most biochemical factors, and is not large enough to explain the several-fold bias observed in evolution. In short, the available data have the power to verify the "conservative transitions" hypothesis if true, but suggest instead that selection on proteins plays at best a minor role in the observed bias.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.