Is Dryopithecus an ancient gorilla?
I pass along with little comment this New Scientist article in which David Begun is claiming that the fossil ape Dryopithecus may actually be an extinct memb...
All posts tagged with mutation
Link: Minutes of the mutation rate meeting
Iain Mathieson shares his notes on a recent meeting of scientists investigating mutation rate estimation in humans: “The human mutation rate meeting”.
Space radiation
Maggie Koerth-Baker, on “How space radiation hurts astronauts”. I did not know about this part:
Recent evolution of coding variants
How did I get myself quoted in a story as the skeptic about recent human evolution? (“Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase”). After all, I’ve been a ...
A longer timescale for human evolution
During the last few years, the best estimates of the human single nucleotide mutation rate have been cut in half. Until recently, estimates of mutation rate ...
Recombination in chimpanzees
Adam Auton and colleagues Auton:2012 sequenced a panel of chimpanzees to examine recombination in that species, thereby constructing a chimp-specific genetic...
When genes break: validating loss-of-function variants
Daniel MacArthur and colleagues have an important paper in Science, titled “A Systematic Survey of Loss-of-Function Variants in Human Protein-Coding Genes” M...
Eye pigmentation and allele frequencies
Eye pigmentation in humans varies along a spectrum of colors from dark brown, through lighter brown, hazel, and green, to light blue. These differences are c...
What is the human mutation rate?
Last spring I wrote about a study that used whole-genome comparisons between parents and offspring to estimate the rate of per-genome mutation in humans (“A ...
A low human mutation rate may throw everything out of whack
Last week, a paper looking for the genetic causes of Miller syndrome reported the whole genomes of four members of a single family: two siblings with the dis...