A new study suggests that ‘silent’ mutations – changes to DNA that don’t alter the structure of the protein it encodes – may nonetheless have an impact on evolution. For example, alanine – an amino acid, one of the building blocks of DNA – can be encoded as GCC, GCA or GCG; these codes are theoretically equivalent and a mutation between them wouldn’t change the structure of the protein.
According to the new study, such mutations do appear to have an impact on how much protein is produced, which in turn can impact fitness. If silent mutations do indeed have an effect, it could mean big changes for how we ‘read’ genomes.
Original research paper published in the journal Nature Communications on June 10, 2014.
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