Re-evaluating evidence for adaptive mutation rate variation
Long Wang, Alexander T Ho, Laurence D. Hurst, Sihai Yang
Abstract
Although mutation rates vary within genomes, suggestions 1 , 2 that more selectively important DNA has a lower mutation rate are contentious not least because unbiased estimation of the mutation rate is challenging 3 . Monroe et al. 4 (hereafter Monroe) also report that in Arabidopsis more important sequences have lower mutation rates and, while overlooking similar claims 1 , suggest that this challenges “a long-standing paradigm regarding the randomness of mutation” 4 . We find, however, that their mutation calling has abundant sequencing and analysis artefacts explaining why their data are not congruent with well-evidenced mutational profiles. As the key trends associated with sequence importance are consistent with well-described mutation-calling artefacts and are not resilient to reanalysis using the higher-quality components of their data, we conclude that their claims are not robustly substantiated.