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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America logoLink to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
. 1994 Jan 18;91(2):827–831. doi: 10.1073/pnas.91.2.827

Weak male-driven molecular evolution in rodents.

B H Chang 1, L C Shimmin 1, S K Shyue 1, D Hewett-Emmett 1, W H Li 1
PMCID: PMC43042  PMID: 8290607

Abstract

In humans and rodents the male-to-female ratio of mutation rate (alpha m) has been suggested to be extremely large, so that the process of nucleotide substitution is almost completely male-driven. However, our sequence data from the last intron of the X chromosome-linked (Zfx) and Y chromosome-linked (Zfy) zinc finger protein genes suggest that alpha m is only approximately 2 in rodents with a 95% confidence interval from 1 to 3. Moreover, from published data on oogenesis and spermatogenesis we estimate the male-to-female ratio of the number of germ cell divisions per generation to be approximately 2 in rodents, confirming our estimate of alpha m and suggesting that errors in DNA replication are the primary source of mutation. As the estimated alpha m for rodents is only one-third of our previous estimate of approximately 6 for higher primates, there appear to be generation-time effects--i.e., alpha m decreases with decreasing generation time.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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