Likewise our results complement a recent report stating that based on the number of cells in established tumors and a conservative mutation rate, clones containing mutations conferring drug resistance will inevitably be present pre-treatment [ 17].
These properties include the absence of recombination, low effective population size and the conservative mutation rate, allowing for primers to be designed over a wide taxonomic range [ 34, 35].
Assuming the very conservative mutation rate for CR-I of 4.9% per million years, a generation time 3.5 years, and the tau value 8.52, expansion of yellowfin tuna occurred about 522 Ky ago.
Divergence times based on corrected genetic distance, which used a conservative range of mutation rates, generally post-date the LGM (Tables 2 and 3; 200 to 12,000 years ago), except for comparisons between eastern and western sky islands in the Arizona archipelago, for which divergence estimates were older (see below).
Our analysis, even by a conservative estimation of mutation rate, indicates that the SARS-CoV population has already harbored a considerable amount of genetic diversity.
High mitochondrial divergence rates have been reported for some marine and freshwater animals [ 24- 26], but for the vast majority of cases mitochondrial COI is relatively conservative in its mutation rate within and among species.
These estimates are used in most theoretical studies, and should be viewed as conservative estimates (in particular, per zygote mutation rates are likely to be higher in most species of conservation concern than in Drosophila species, [ 51, 54]).
Substitution by alanine and – in the case of Glu98 – also glutamine leads to a ∼50 100-fold decrease in O2 reduction rates, while the structurally conservative mutation of Tyr70 to phenylalanine leads to a 3-fold decrease of the catalytic rate.
Genetics has shown us that replication rates are much higher than mutation rates, allowing us to see the conservative nature of the organism on a generation-to-generation basis, that is, in real time.
Using mutation rates derived from the literature and conservative biological assumptions, we show via mathematical modeling and simulations that phenotypic mutations allow evolution to select for neutral intermediate alleles of a multi-mutation trait, actually selecting for proteins whose exact DNA sequence is not in the organism under selection.
