By densely confining animals by the billions to feed our large appetite for animal products, we are unwittingly accelerating the mutation of the influenza virus into strains more deadly than we have yet seen.
Mathematical models predict that exacerbating the deleterious effects of passenger mutations or accelerating the mutation rate could actually be exploited in cancer treatment (McFarland et al., 2013).
Because the error-prone polymerase UmuC plays a key role in accelerating the mutation frequency, we determined the influence of phototreatment on the development of spontaneous resistance to rifampicin.
It is conceivable, therefore, that when a population faces environmental challenges, it would be advantageous to accelerate the mutation rate.
Although limited, there is evidence to support that the predisposition to breast cancer among BRCA1 mutation carriers is due to haploinsufficiency associated with heterozygosity, which increases genomic instability and accelerates the mutation rate of other critical genes, including the second copy of BRCA1 (Konishi et al, 2011; Salmena and Narod, 2012).
Current efforts to sequence the exomes of wheat TILLING lines [ 63] is accelerating the discovery of mutations for most of the genes presented in this study, which will facilitate the experimental validation of their function and the testing of their effects on plant height and productivity.
The mutator hypothesis states that mutations leading to enhanced genomic instability (termed "mutator mutations") drive cancer pathogenesis by accelerating the acquisition of oncogenic mutations.
First, whilst an increase in the mutation rate accelerates the accumulation of tumour-causing mutations, it will also accelerate the accumulation of mutations deleterious for tumour growth (Cahill et al. 1999); therefore, an increase in the mutation rate could potentially cause retardation of tumour growth, a phenomenon termed negative clonal selection (Beckman and Loeb 2005).
In addition, and critically, if the cancer has acquired genetic instability, this will greatly accelerate the rate of mutation accrual.
The advent of massively parallel, short read DNA sequencing- the 'second generation' sequencing technologies, and their application to cancer has also accelerated the pace of mutation discovery.
Loss of efficiency of one or more DNA repair mechanisms, whether by germline inheritance or sporadic mutation, accelerates the rate of accumulation of additional mutations by 100 1,000 times, with selective pressure favoring those mutations that drive carcinogenesis – the "mutator phenotype".
