We’re All Mutants, According To New Genetic Material Sequencing Research

“We’re all mutants”, that’s the end of a study by 16 scientists from various countries who used a new method called direct sequencing to count individual differences among 10 million units (nucleotides) of DNA belong to each of two men living in the same Chinese village who shared an antecedent 200 years ago.

The reading was the work of Dr Yali Xue from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, UK, and colleagues, and was available online on 27 August in the journal Current Biology.

Xue was one of the leaders of the task which also included other researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and also from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army General Hospital in Beijing, and the Beijing Genomics institution at Shenzhen, China.
“Understanding the key process of human change is important for many aspects of medical genetics and human evolution,” wrote the authors.

We have known for a long time that mutations occur irregularly in each individual, but have had to guess accurately how often. Because mutations can lead unswervingly to diseases like cancer, we need improved measurements of mutation rates, so we can test ways to reduce mutations, for example.

Now, thanks to advances in the skill for reading DNA and this new research, we can begin to do this.

Xue and colleagues used new sequencing expertise to measure the number of nucleotide differences in the DNA code of the Y chromosome between two men alienated by 13 generations.

They were able to do this because one of the researchers, Qiuju Wang found a family in China who had live in the same village for centuries. Their topics were two men whose common ancestor lived 200 years ago.

DNA is the blueprint of an organism: different species have different blueprints. And within species, individual blueprints differs. Think of the blueprint as being like an instruction physical for making the organism, a very large book with lots of chapter and pages, printed in an alphabet of DNA “letters”, the nucleotides.

One such part is the Y chromosome, which comes down the generations through the male, virtually unaffected. It’s a very big chapter, containing some 10 million letters or nucleotides, and each one has to be compare position by position, to find the differences between two persons.

This is what Xue and colleagues did, and they found just four change: four nucleotide differences (differently spelled words) amongst millions were the only difference in the DNA of the Y chromosomes of two men 13 generation apart.

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