ArticleMolecular biology and evolution2017
Population Heterogeneity in Mutation Rate Increases the Frequency of Higher-Order Mutants and Reduces Long-Term Mutational Load.
Article in Molecular biology and evolution, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Enlarging viral mutation estimation: a view from the distribution of mutation rates.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2026Article
- A bacterial ecocline in Klebsiella pneumoniae may explain its backboned phylogeny.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Mutation rate variability in viral populations: Implications for lethal mutagenesis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- A transient mutational burst occurs during yeast colony development.Molecular systems biology · 2025Article
- Estimating mutation rates under heterogeneous stress responses.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Real-time monitoring of replication errors' fate reveals the origin and dynamics of spontaneous mutations.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
- Mutators can drive the evolution of multi-resistance to antibiotics.PLoS genetics · 2023Article
- Distribution of mutation rates challenges evolutionary predictability.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2023Article
- Mutation rate dynamics reflect ecological change in an emerging zoonotic pathogen.PLoS genetics · 2021Article
- Interplay between genetic, epigenetic, and gene expression variability: Considering complexity in evolvability.Evolutionary applications · 2021Review
- Bacterial phenotypic heterogeneity in DNA repair and mutagenesis.Biochemical Society transactions · 2020Review
- Review
- Gene Expression Noise Produces Cell-to-Cell Heterogeneity in Eukaryotic Homologous Recombination Rate.Frontiers in genetics · 2019Article
- Opposing effects of final population density and stress on Escherichia coli mutation rate.The ISME journal · 2018Article
- Why are RNA virus mutation rates so damn high?PLoS biology · 2018Article
- Real-time dynamics of mutagenesis reveal the chronology of DNA repair and damage tolerance responses in single cells.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Heterogeneity of spontaneous DNA replication errors in single isogenicScience advances · 2018Article
- Death and population dynamics affect mutation rate estimates and evolvability under stress in bacteria.PLoS biology · 2018Article
- Spontaneous mutation rate is a plastic trait associated with population density across domains of life.PLoS biology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mutation rate is a crucial evolutionary parameter that has typically been treated as a constant in population genetic analyses. However, the propensity to mutate is likely to vary among co-existing individuals within a population, due to genetic polymorphisms, heterogeneous environmental influences, and random physiological fluctuations. We review the evidence for mutation rate heterogeneity and explore its consequences by extending classic population genetic models to allow an arbitrary distribution of mutation rate among individuals, either with or without inheritance. With this general new framework, we rigorously establish the effects of heterogeneity at various evolutionary timescales. In a single generation, variation of mutation rate about the mean increases the probability of producing zero or many simultaneous mutations on a genome. Over multiple generations of mutation and selection, heterogeneity accelerates the appearance of both deleterious and beneficial multi-point mutants. At mutation-selection balance, higher-order mutant frequencies are likewise boosted, while lower-order mutants exhibit subtler effects; nonetheless, population mean fitness is always enhanced. We quantify the dependencies on moments of the mutation rate distribution and selection coefficients, and clarify the role of mutation rate inheritance. While typical methods of estimating mutation rate will recover only the population mean, analyses assuming mutation rate is fixed to this mean could underestimate the potential for multi-locus adaptation, including medically relevant evolution in pathogenic and cancerous populations. We discuss the potential to empirically parameterize mutation rate distributions, which have to date hardly been quantified.
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