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Rate of deleterious mutation and the distribution of its effects on fitness in vesicular stomatitis virus
Author(s) -
Santiago F. Elena,
Andrés Moyá
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
journal of evolutionary biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.289
H-Index - 128
eISSN - 1420-9101
pISSN - 1010-061X
DOI - 10.1046/j.1420-9101.1999.00110.x
Subject(s) - biology , vesicular stomatitis virus , mutation accumulation , mutation rate , mutation , vesicular stomatitis indiana virus , genetics , rna virus , genetic fitness , experimental evolution , vesicular stomatitis , rna , evolutionary biology , virus , biological evolution , gene
Despite their importance, the parameters describing the spontaneous deleterious mutation process have not been well described in many organisms. If mutations are important for the evolution of every living organism, their importance becomes critical in the case of RNA‐based viruses, in which the frequency of mutation is orders of magnitude larger than in DNA‐based organisms. The present work reports minimum estimates of the deleterious mutation rate, as well as the characterization of the distribution of deleterious mutational effects on the total fitness of the vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV). The estimates are based on mutation‐accumulation experiments in which selection against deleterious mutations was minimized by recurrently imposing genetic bottlenecks of size one. The estimated deleterious mutation rate was 1.2 mutations per genome and generation, with a mean fitness effect of –0.39% per generation. At the end of the mutation‐accumulation experiment, the average reduction in fitness was 38% and the distribution of accumulated deleterious effects was, on average, left‐skewed. The magnitude of the skewness depends on the initial fitness of the clone analysed. The implications of our findings for the evolutionary biology of RNA viruses are discussed.