A Research Article Digest: Short Range Mutational Biases Largely Define Genome Heptameric Composition
Research Article Title: Single genome retrieval of context-dependent variability in mutation rates for human germline. Journal: BMC Genomics, 2017, 18, 81. http://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-016-3440-5 (first deposited in bioRxiv on 10 August 2015) Simple Short Explanation of the Work for Everyone: Our genome is a very long DNA strand holding a sequence of nucleobases. Those nucleobases are of four types - letters A, T, G and C - and there are ~3.5 billion such letters in our genome. However, the letters do not stay the same over evolutionary timescale (millions to billions of years), and very slowly change/swap (or, as we call it, mutate) in our genome, driving the evolution of life. The work presents a technique to retrieve the speed with which those letters change/swap by accounting the full extent on how the neighbouring letters tune the speed. We use only a single genome, rather than requiring thousands of genomes as needed for such ...