So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens, PLoS ONE and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here is my pick for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Mutation and Evolutionary Rates in Adelie Penguins from the Antarctic:
Molecular evolutionary theory suggests that for neutral DNA sequences, rates of mutation and evolution should be equal. However, there has been considerable variation in empirical estimates of rates of molecular change in vertebrate animals, even for the same regions of the mitochondrial genome. A difficulty is that evolutionary rates estimated from ancient DNA and short-term mutation rates are not available for the same species. We present data on the rate of mutation of the mitochondrial hypervariable region in Adélie penguins from the Antarctic. All recorded mutations were heteroplasmic in mothers, and almost invariably, both genetic variants were passed to their offspring. We compared this rate of mutation to the rate of evolution estimated using serially preserved ancient remains. We show that these two estimates were not statistically different from each other.
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