To eliminate any fortuitous mutations acquired during the mutagenesis process, the transposon insertion was transduced into strain Newman with the staphylococcal phage φ85.
This might be because a U12 to U2 conversion requires multiple fortuitous mutations or circumstances.
It also raises an important question regarding the source of variation upon which early artificial selection depended: were these fortuitous new mutations that arose shortly before and/or sequentially during domestication, or were they already present in wild populations?
For example, Amerind strains might have lost vigor due to genetic drift (chance mutation, fortuitous fixation of deleterious alleles) during migrations of small founder populations from Asia into Beringia and ultimately into the Americas [23].
With only two non-edited genes unscathed in any of the three genomes, specifically COI and ND1, the functional necessity of these genes versus their fortuitous exclusion from indel mutation will be clarified with the sequencing of additional maxicircles.
One fortuitous consequence of introducing the six humanising mutations was to lower Tm from >95 °C for the wild-type RadA to 81.0 °C for MAYSAM RadA, thus facilitating thermal-shift screening as complete denaturation curves can be recorded.
However, rates of evolution can be very slow and depend upon the fortuitous input of a continuing series of mutations with effects of a particular kind occurring in the right order with respect to the equilibrium.
Fortuitous disruption of ESEs by missense, silent, and nonsense mutations, promotes exon skipping, intron retention, or exon size reduction.
More generally, compensatory mutations have been detected, often in a fortuitous way, during genetic analyses of different viruses of animals or plants (see Luna et al. [ 36] and references therein).
