Mutations are the raw ingredient of evolution, providing variation that sometimes makes an organism more successful in its environment. But most mutations are expected to be neutral and have no impact ...

The discovery may have important implications for evolutionary genetics. Many genetic mutations are neutral, meaning that they can slowly accumulate over time without affecting the viability of the ...

Thought LeadersMaxwell Sherman Graduate Student and PhD Candidate Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT In this interview, News-Medical speaks to Maxwell Sherman, an MIT graduate student and one ...

Ever since the genetic code was cracked, those mutations have generally been assumed to be neutral, or nearly so. But in a study scheduled for online publication June 8 in the journal Nature that ...

Genes hold the recipe for proteins, which are made of amino acids. DNA only has four letters, or nucleotides, and each sequence of three nucleotide bases, or codon, encodes for one amino acid. There ...

In the world of threatened and endangered species conservation, the genomic revolution has raised some complicated questions: How can scientists justify assessing species genetic diversity without ...

The COVID-19-causing coronavirus is mutating as it spreads around the world in the pandemic, but none of the mutations currently documented appears to be making it able to spread more rapidly, ...

In a recent study published in Nature Biotechnology, researchers explored the causes of cancer by mapping somatic mutation rates across the human genome. Study: Genome-wide mapping of somatic mutation ...

These neutral mutations cause genome sequences to change at a steady rate over time. Because this rate is known, scientists can compare the percentage difference in the sequence between two organisms ...