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Re: [HAPS-L] Mutations





On 2/23/07, WCaldecutt@xxxxxxxx <WCaldecutt@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
We only see noncoding DNA in living organisms, so that skews our view of how many "harmless" mutations occur.  We never get to see the mutations that result in a failure to produce an observable offspring.


Just chiming in to agree and expand: if you're attempting to use molecular clock assumptions, you're sampling a survivor descended from many generations of reproductive winners - that doesn't tell you how many gamete-killing or zygote-killing mutations happened along the way.

Interestingly, I just read that some regions of that "junk" DNA are so highly conserved that mutations there are highly likely to be lethals:

http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0030007

Executive summary: authors found more than a thousand short-ish (over 100 base-pairs) non-coding sequences strongly conserved between the human and puffer fish genomes.

cheers,
JMJ