ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Mutation-rate plasticity and the germline of unicellular organisms.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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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.
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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.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 31 citations in OpenAlex.
- Can Unicellular Organisms Sequester a Germline? The Yeast-Germline Hypothesis.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2025Review
- Article
- Longevity of Fungal Mycelia and Nuclear Quality Checks: a New Hypothesis for the Role of Clamp Connections in Dikaryons.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2023Review
- Asymmetry, division of labour and the evolution of ageing in multicellular organisms.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- The Longevity of Colonies of Fungus-Growing Termites and the Stability of the Symbiosis.Insects · 2020Review
- Clonal evolution and genome stability in a 2500-year-old fungal individual.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The mutation rate is a fundamental factor in evolutionary genetics. Recently, mutation rates were found to be strongly reduced at high density in a wide range of unicellular organisms, prokaryotic and eukaryotic. Independently, cell division was found to become more asymmetrical at increasing density in diverse organisms; some 'mother' cells continue dividing, while their 'offspring' cells do not divide further. Here, we investigate how this increased asymmetry in cell division at high density can be reconciled with reduced mutation-rate estimates. We calculated the expected number of mutant cells due to replication errors under various modes of segregation of template-DNA strands and copy-DNA strands, both under symmetrical (exponential) and asymmetrical (linear) growth. We show that the observed reduction in the mutation rate at high density can be explained if mother cells preferentially retain the template-DNA strands, since new mutations are then confined to non-dividing daughter cells, thus reducing the spread of mutant cells. Any other inheritance mode results in an increase in the number of mutant cells at higher density. The proposed hypothesis that patterns of DNA-strand segregation are density-dependent fundamentally challenges our current understanding of mutation-rate estimates and extends the distinction between germline and soma to unicellular organisms.
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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.