Under increased mutation rates these longer solutions cannot arise or maintained anymore.
Therefore, under high mutation rates these variants generate a better adapted cloud of mutants.
As a result, at high mutation rates these sequences compete with the master sequence (the single sequence that has higher fitness than all other sequences), and can win this competition at sufficiently high mutation rate by sheer abundance.
In light of carnivore mutation rates, these synonymous distances suggest that the most recent common mitochondrial ancestor for Northern California, Southern California, and the majority of Rocky Mountain haplotypes date to approximately 16.7 kya (9.0 - 31.3 kya).
If the differences in D determined for enhancers of forebrain, midbrain, limb and heart tissues is only due to variations in local mutation rates, these differences should disappear when D is normalized to neutral substitution rates (e.g., approximately by d4 or di).
After rejecting the above hypotheses, we conclude that the majority of these cSNPs and cSNSs must arise as a result of elevated mutation rate at these sites.
Indeed, deletion of UBC13 causes a 25-fold increase in the spontaneous mutation rate; when these ubc13 mutant cells were transformed with a plasmid containing OsUbc13, the spontaneous mutation rate was reduced to about fivefold (Table 1).
Direct or cloned sequencing of targeted regions showed that, among those T0 plants, the total mutation rate of these two target sites reached 81.5% (Table 2), and two and three independent homozygous mutants with different mutation types were found at target 1 and target 2, respectively (Fig. 4c, h).
Low and high diversity loci may simply indicate a lower or higher mutation rate at these loci than the average mutation rate considered over all loci (see Methods).
