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All Humans Are Mutants, Say Scientists
Hugh Pickens writes "In 1935, JBS Haldane, one of the founders of modern genetics, studied a group of men with the blood disease hemophilia and speculated that there would be about 150 new mutations in each human being. Now BBC reports that scientists have used next generation sequencing technology to produce a far more direct and reliable estimate of the number of mutations by looking at thousands of genes belonging to two Chinese men who are distantly related, having shared a common ancestor who was born in 1805. To establish the rate of mutation, the team examined an area of the Y chromosome which is unique because, apart from rare mutations, the Y chromosome is passed unchanged from father to son so mutations accumulate slowly over the generations. Despite many generations of separation, researchers found only 12 differences among all the DNA letters examined. The two Y chromosomes were still identical at 10,149,073 of the 10,149,085 letters examined."
...to the SubGenius and Devo fans in the house.
If "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and "it was beauty that killed the beast" then "please stop staring at me".
looks uncomfortable.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Does this apply to non-humans as well?
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
And here we have scientific evidence that human mutation is working as Designed.
Weird, I'm suddenly craving a bowl of spaghetti.
My mutant super power is my ability to get depressed and lose focus. Oh man, I wish I'd gotten that cool one that gives you resistance to malaria and painfully inflamed fingers and toes. Mine seems kinda useless by comparison.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
SMBC is completely accurate on this count.
Y = 1/300th total chromosome
3600 mutations total
8 generations in 200 years
450 per generation
5 in protein coding section of genome
That cant be generally true otherwise all Chinese people would look identical. oh wait...
Given what we know about biology, every living thing, including viruses, are mutants (or at least descendants of mutants).
The article title has to be one of the more braindead ones I've seen here on Slashdot, and I've been around for a while. (And somehow I don't understand how it's connected with the information in the summary.)
OTOH, I'm real tired....
No. You don't. The certainty of the inference is just low. This is a fine start, and new data will be added as genetic sequencing becomes cheaper.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Rather than making me think that all humans are mutants, this made me think: Wow, over a runtime of 204 years, the DNA copying process has an accuracy of 99.99988%, or an error rate of only 0.00012%.
I think we'll be hard-pressed to replicate that level of awesomeness in computers anytime soon.
Alphanos
Basically, they should be looking at the men that are from the same place (assuming that one of the two live in the exact same area and others ppl can be found). I think that they will find many of them have the same sets of mutations. The reason is that I believe that many of these mutations are from virus, not from random mutations. If from radiation/chemical (i.e. random), then you will not see the same mutations across ppl that exist in same area. But if from virus, you will see that many of these are similar (though possibly not in the exact same area of the strands).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Try this in Alabama, where they can use the terms wife,mother,and daughter interchangeably.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Forgive me if I'm wrong. I'm fairly sure I have at least a basic grasp of the idea of statistical sampling, as used to infer the traits of a large population using a smaller representative sample from that population. But don't you still need a sample size bigger than two to make inferences about all of humanity?
The statistics are in the number of base pairs and the amount of time since common ancestor, not the number of people. So we know that in that lineage, mutations occur at a given rate which I'm too lazy to calculate.
$ make available
And that is why you only have a basic grasp of statistical sampling as it is practised in the modern world.
May the Maths Be with you!
if the y chromosome remains relatively unchanged, and the X is subject to cross splicing with other x chromosomes (from either parent) that must mean that females at least as far as the sex-linked traits are concerned) evolves much faster than males, since there's rarely any opportunity for diversity in the Y chromosome?
So next time a woman calls you "barbaric" etc you can say Got that right!
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I seem to remember them saying that the mutations come from the father, how women are mutants I don't know.
I have shocking news for you, you may want to have a seat: women have fathers, just like men. Disturbing, I know.
We are D-E-V-O!
We've already taken control of our own evolution, for better or worse:
Does anyone else see the conflict of interest inherent in that statement? This is what we humans do: we change the system before we even understand it. We try to "cure" autism before we even grasp its genetic or evolutionary significance.
We won't ever be able to get an accurate answer to this question: we've already been busy contaminating the evidence. We worry about seeding Mars or other planets with terrestrial microbes before we get a chance to conclusively rule out independent signs of life, but we think nothing of poisoning our own genetic well before we even understand what's down there and why.
If I want I can set up two 4TB raids on my server at home (assuming I had more disk space), and issue the command dd if=/dev/mdx of=/dev/mdy bs=1M count=4000000. Then I could do a diff on the two volumes. I'd be shocked if they had any errors at all.
If you turn off the error correction and the sparing of unusable sectors, you would indeed be shocked. Here's an idea, buy some of those video disk drives that Seagate makes.
Best regards.
The statistics are in the number of base pairs and the amount of time since common ancestor, not the number of people. So we know that in that lineage, mutations occur at a given rate which I'm too lazy to calculate.
But it's restricted to two people, or not even that, it could be just one different ancestor. Maybe one's grandfather was exposed to radiation, or mutagenic chemicals.
7-10 generations isn't that many...
The Y chromosome doesn't get to recombine, so measuring the mutation rate of the Y chromosome only gives us a limited understanding of mutations in general.
Lack of recombination means you don't get to measure mutations that consist of genes being brought together for the first time in an individual. It also eliminates entire classes of accidental mutations. On the other hand, it removes the opportunity for some types of in-cell DNA repair.
Furthermore, the Y chromosome is less interesting than most. It contains very few working genes, precisely because it is not subject to the most important DNA repair mechanism of all: sexual reproduction.
The shareholder is always right.
Even if it was ammo, would you really listen to someone who believed that humans were formed from dust or a clot of blood and continue to believe the parlor tricks of old mystical texts?
I wouldn't, but some of my friends, relatives do (In addition to several of our lawmakers). I also do not avoid being an evangelist for what I consider rational thought. Therefore, I do care what BS is flowing through the collective minds of the religious crowd. It is akin to me knowing a lot more about homoeopathy than several of my acquaintances who actually believe in its efficacy. These people actually feed their babies sugar pills (I do not see how placebo effect can help babies even if that is the one part of homoeopathy that works) instead of treating them as they should.
The ignorant are not the problem though. It is the irrational minds who corrupt the ignorant minds that we need to be wary of.
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
They take it to a doctor, because science and medicine work
This is still having faith in the ability of the doctor. We need to use more discriminatory words than "faith", I think.
Every sample has the same ontological status as the last one. Data sets are bigger and richer than each other, not "more accurate" (assuming it was collected "correctly").
A single sample can be enough to discredit a scientific theory. A single sample is the start of a scientific theory, which can be added to, and modified as data is added to its underlying base. The processes by which this are done is called "statistics" and "science".
I have shocking news for you. You may want to have a seat. You've been lied to about this.
Ultimately, yes, mutations like the ones studied here drive evolution and speciation. They are the mechanism behind generating completely new genetic information. However, in terms of following the genetics of a diverse population, genetic recombination events like crossover have a greater effect on the changes from generation to generation than mutations.
As this experiment shows, you might have accumulated a few hundred single nucleotide polymorphisms- differences at one base pair- in the lineage from your great-grandfathers to you. However, so much shuffling of the genetic deck occurs in each generation's gametes that, as may be obvious to you, two people (siblings, for example) can be closely related but display very distinct traits. The reason why you'd want to focus on the Y chromosome if you wanted to isolate the mutation rate is that it doesn't undergo all of this shuffling; you probably only have a maximum of one (there are a few XYY males)and it passes down patrilineally with only random mutations to change it. Those two men tested could well have very similar Y chromosomes, but otherwise be genetically very different.
I would argue that there is a survivorship bias in studying mutation in the Y chromosome, though. There aren't many genes on the Y chromosome, but the ones it does have tend to be critical for producing healthy, fertile males. It might be the case that mutation rates that might be tolerable on other (somatic) chromosomes produce completely inviable offspring when they occur at that rate on the Y.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
You have so many things wrong here that there is absolutely NO reason to try and correct you on it. Just so that you know, all virus incorporate their RNA/DNA back into your DNA. Some will actually excise snippets of your DNA out to replace theirs in there. And mutations are not just base pair changes, but also addition as well as deletions. Finally, just because a virus can hit any of the chromosomes does not preclude the ability to hit the y chromosomes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Both links, including the story on the Sanger institute's own page, suggest that this team studied only one set of relatives. I realize this is a lot of work and there aren't many people who would make good test subjects, that you knew were distant relatives. But I can't get over the idea of testing exactly one pair and making sound conclusions from it. Seems like they're assuming those 12 mutations were gradually accrued. Maybe the actual rate of mutation is much lower, except for Grandpa Li who wore a uranium codpiece every day and 10 of the mutations occoured then.
My point is determining the number of mutations between two people is impressive biology, but saying that's a universal constant is overstating it.
As part of getting enough Y chromosomes for their experiment, they inserted their two donor genomes into two groups of cell cultures to amplify the amount of genetic material. The cell lines are made from lymphocytes which have been infected with the Epstein-Barr virus; it's more or less a culture of Hodgkin's lymphoma cancer cells. They isolated the Y chromosomes (they got around 600 nanograms of each of the two lines), and then did their sequencing.
The problem with amplifying the material in this manner is that it's bound to introduce a few more mutations, since there is cell division involved, and cancer cells in particular can be a bit sloppy in replicating genes. So, to account for the mutations caused by their amplification procedure, they double checked the twelve candidate mutations they found against the donor's DNA from blood samples (not amplified by cell culture) and against the same regions in very close male relatives of the donors (if you are male and have a biological full brother, then your Y chromosomes should be almost completely identical). They scratched eight candidate mutations off as coming from the cell culture process, leaving four.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."