MBE Advance Access originally published online on October 20, 2004
Molecular Biology and Evolution 2005 22(3):426-431; doi:10.1093/molbev/msi025
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Research Article |
How Strong Is the Mutagenicity of Recombination in Mammals?



* Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago;
Institute of Zoology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; and
Department of Biological Sciences, University of South Carolina, Columbia
E-mail: whli{at}uchicago.edu.
It is commonly believed that a high recombination rate such as that in a pseudoautosomal region (PAR) greatly increases the mutation rate because a 170-fold increase was estimated for the mouse PAR region. However, sequencing PAR and non-PAR introns of the Fxy gene in four Mus taxa, we found an increase of only twofold to fivefold. Furthermore, analyses of sequence data from human and orangutan PAR and X-linked regions and from autosomal regions showed a weak effect of recombination on mutation rate (a slope of less than 0.2% per cM/Mb), although a much stronger effect on GC content (1% to 2% per cM/Mb). Because typical recombination rates in mammals are much lower than those in PARs, the mutagenicity of recombination is weak or, at best, moderate, although its effect on GC% is much stronger. In addition, contrary to a previous study, we found no Fxy duplicate in Mus spretus.
Key Words: pseudoautosomal region recombination rate mutation rate nucleotide substitution
![]()
CiteULike
Connotea
Del.icio.us What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles:
![]() |
M. Brandstrom and H. Ellegren The Genomic Landscape of Short Insertion and Deletion Polymorphisms in the Chicken (Gallus gallus) Genome: A High Frequency of Deletions in Tandem Duplicates Genetics, July 1, 2007; 176(3): 1691 - 1701. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
||||
![]() |
C. Schmegner, J. Hoegel, W. Vogel, and G. Assum The Rate, Not the Spectrum, of Base Pair Substitutions Changes at a GC-Content Transition in the Human NF1 Gene Region: Implications for the Evolution of the Mammalian Genome Structure Genetics, January 1, 2007; 175(1): 421 - 428. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
||||
![]() |
A. V. Smith, D. J. Thomas, H. M. Munro, and G. R. Abecasis Sequence features in regions of weak and strong linkage disequilibrium Genome Res., November 1, 2005; 15(11): 1519 - 1534. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
||||
![]() |
D. J. Gaffney and P. D. Keightley The scale of mutational variation in the murid genome Genome Res., August 1, 2005; 15(8): 1086 - 1094. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
||||
![]() |
S. Yi and W.-H. Li Molecular Evolution of Recombination Hotspots and Highly Recombining Pseudoautosomal Regions in Hominoids Mol. Biol. Evol., May 1, 2005; 22(5): 1223 - 1230. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
||||


