Cancer does not develop overnight. It can take decades for cancer‐promoting changes in the genome to eventually lead to the ...

Mutations are the raw ingredient of evolution, providing variation that sometimes makes an organism more successful in its environment. But most mutations are expected to be neutral and have no ...

Most non-neutral mutations are deleterious. In general, the more base pairs that are affected by a mutation, the larger the effect of the mutation, and the larger the mutation's probability of ...

Over the past several years, researchers have been doing some interesting research into how seemingly neutral mutations, the products of genetic drift, can help organisms adapt to changing ...

Therefore, if most mutations are neutral (as proposed in the neutral theory) and if mutation rates are constant over time, substitutions should occur constantly over time as well.

For 50 years, evolutionary theory has emphasized the importance of neutral mutations over adaptive ones in DNA. Real genomic data challenge that assumption.

More mutations mean more chances to evolve, but because most mutations are neutral or harmful, organisms often evolve proteins to fix DNA copying mistakes, which keeps the mutation rate low.

Those mutations have generally been assumed to be neutral, or nearly so. A new study involving the genetic manipulation of yeast cells shows that most synonymous mutations are strongly harmful.

Initially innocuous genetic changes known as neutral mutations may play a role in disorders ranging from the flu and bacterial infections to schizophrenia ...

Last month I wrote an essay about the future of evolution for Science. I paid particularly close attention to what will happen to our own species, describing some recent research and ideas from ...

Neutral mutations, which neither improve nor hinder viruses’ survival, may continue to circulate without any noticeable change in the people they infect.

But 35 of the mutations in immune genes spread far faster than the neutral ones — so fast that only natural selection could account for their success.