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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2011 Aug 1.
Published in final edited form as: Trends Genet. 2010 Jun 30;26(8):345–352. doi: 10.1016/j.tig.2010.05.003

Table 1.

Mutation rates per nucleotide site (× 10−9) in a variety of tissues.

Mutation ratesb

Species Tissue Cell divisions per generationa Per generation Per cell division
Homo sapiens Germline 216 12.85 0.06
Retina 55 54.45 0.99
Intestinal epithelium 600 162.00 0.27
Fibroblast (culture) 1.34
Lymphocytes (culture) 1.47
Mus musculus Male germline 39 38.00 0.97
Brain 76.94
Colon 83.35
Epidermis 90.38
Intestine 117.69
Liver 237.88
Lung 166.83
Spleen 130.00
Rattus norvegicus Colon 178.38
Kidney 167.45
Liver 179.92
Lung 223.22
Mammary gland 57.70
Prostate 448.90
Spleen 101.62
Drosophila melanogaster Germline 36 4.65 0.13
Whole body 380.92
Caenorhabditis elegans Germline 9 5.60 0.62
Arabidopsis thaliana Germline 40 6.50 0.16
Saccharomyces cerevisiae 1 0.33 0.33
Escherichia coli 1 0.26 0.26
a

References to data on numbers of germline cell divisions: human (Crow 2000); D. melanogaster and mouse (Drost and Lee 1995); C. elegans (Wilkins 1992); and . A. thaliana (Hoffman et al. 2004). Numbers of cell divisions are unknown for the mouse and rat rates.

b

Mammalian tissue-specific rates are given only for tissues in which at least two independent estimates have been acquired. All data on human mutation rates are taken from Lynch (2010). Data for somatic mutation rates in mouse and rat are derived from references contained within the Supplementary Material. References to data on germline mutation rates: D. melanogaster (Keightley et al. 2009); C. elegans (Denver et al. 2009); A. thaliana (Ossowski et al. 2009); S. cerevisiae (Lynch et al. 2008); and E. coli (Lynch 2006).