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Mutation: it’s the raw material for evolution. That makes knowing the rate at which it occurs crucial to the study of evolutionary biology.
Mutation rate figures into all kinds of calculations. For example, the “molecular clocks” that evolutionary biologists use to estimate when one species first diverged into two are based on species’ mutation rates. Scientists also use the rates to track how quickly viruses, such as influenza, evolve. And cancer biologists are interested in using mutation rates to estimate how quickly tumor cell genomes might change over time.
“It is a parameter that you have to input into every mutation-evolution model there is,” says Yuan Zhu, a postdoc at the Genome Institute of Singapore.
Scientists used to infer mutations from phenotypic changes, such as the development of drug resistance. Now, thanks to increasingly cost-effective and rapid DNA sequencing, more-sophisticated ways of getting a ...
