ArticleEvolution letters2023
Experimental estimates of germline mutation rate in eukaryotes: a phylogenetic meta-analysis.
Article in Evolution letters, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 64 papers.
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64 citing papers in PubMed, 86 citations in OpenAlex.
- Beyond two alleles: multiallelic genotypic selection and its estimation from time-series data.BMC genomics · 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
- AScience advances · 2026Article
- Nucleotide diversity is a poor predictor of short-term adaptive potential.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The Effect of Age and Sex on the Rate of Germline Mutations in Barn Owls.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- The evolution of structural variation across 500 million years of vertebrate evolution.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The Vertebrate Genomes Project Phase I: A global reference genome resource.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Mutation rate estimate and population genomic analysis reveals decline of koalas prior to human arrival.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Levels of additive genetic variation vary substantially between species.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Developmental speed and chronological time exert opposing effects on the spontaneous mutation rate inEvolution letters · 2026Article
- How precise are mutation rate estimates? Comparison of different approaches to estimate de novo mutation rates.Heredity · 2026Article
- What sets the mutation rate of a cell type in an animal species?PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Evolution of the rate, molecular spectrum, and fitness effects of mutation under minimal selection in Caenorhabditis elegans.Genetics · 2026Article
- MuRaL-indel: a deep learning framework for building insertion and deletion mutation rate maps.Briefings in bioinformatics · 2026Article
- A century of theories of balancing selection.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Dislodging the drift barrier: Why do mutation rates vary?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Extinction vortices are driven more by a shortage of beneficial mutations than by deleterious mutation accumulation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Deciphering the dynamics of active autonomous terminal inverted repeat transposons in the plant kingdom.aBIOTECH · 2026Article
4 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mutation is the ultimate source of all genetic variation, and over the last 10 years the ready availability of whole-genome sequencing has permitted direct estimation of mutation rate for many non-model species across the tree of life. In this meta-analysis, we make a comprehensive search of the literature for mutation rate estimates in eukaryotes, identifying 140 mutation accumulation (MA) and parent-offspring (PO) sequencing studies covering 134 species. Based on these data, we revisit differences in the single-nucleotide mutation (SNM) rate between different phylogenetic lineages and update the known relationships between mutation rate and generation time, genome size, and nucleotide diversity-while accounting for phylogenetic nonindependence. We do not find a significant difference between MA and PO in estimated mutation rates, but we confirm that mammal and plant lineages have higher mutation rates than arthropods and that unicellular eukaryotes have the lowest mutation rates. We find that mutation rates are higher in species with longer generation times and larger genome sizes, even when accounting for phylogenetic relationships. Moreover, although nucleotide diversity is positively correlated with mutation rate, the gradient of the relationship is significantly less than one (on a logarithmic scale), consistent with higher mutation rates in populations with smaller effective size. For the 29 species for which data are available, we find that indel mutation rates are positively correlated with nucleotide mutation rates and that short deletions are generally more common than short insertions. Nevertheless, despite recent progress, no estimates of either SNM or indel mutation rates are available for the majority of deeply branching eukaryotic lineages-or even for most animal phyla. Even among charismatic megafauna, experimental mutation rate estimates remain unknown for amphibia and scarce for reptiles and fish.
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