Mutations are the raw ingredient of evolution, providing variation that sometimes makes an organism more successful in its environment. But most mutations are expected to be neutral and have no impact ...

A major evolutionary theory says most genetic changes don’t really matter, but new evidence suggests that’s not true. Researchers found that helpful mutations happen surprisingly often. The twist is ...

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The discovery may have important implications for evolutionary genetics. Many genetic mutations are neutral, meaning that they can slowly accumulate over time without affecting the viability of the ...

An interdisciplinary team of mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and medical scientists have uncovered an unexpected link between pure mathematics and genetics, that reveals key insights into the ...

For more than half a century, many biologists have leaned on the neutral theory of molecular evolution to explain how DNA and proteins change over time. The idea grew from early work in the 1960s, ...

Ever since the genetic code was cracked, those mutations have generally been assumed to be neutral, or nearly so. But in a study scheduled for online publication June 8 in the journal Nature that ...

Mutations that maintain fitness are vital for diversity. Scientists have now managed to experimentally show how extensive networks of these mutations develop. What fundamentally sets a human being ...

In a recent study published in Nature Biotechnology, researchers explored the causes of cancer by mapping somatic mutation rates across the human genome. Study: Genome-wide mapping of somatic mutation ...

To apply a neutral model of evolution to a population, Hahn explained, you don’t have to know how strong selection is, how large the population is, whether mutations are dominant or recessive, or ...