Moderate nucleotide diversity in the Atlantic herring is associated with a low mutation rate
- Uppsala University, Sweden
- Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden
- University of Bergen, Norway
Abstract
The Atlantic herring is one of the most abundant vertebrates on earth but its nucleotide diversity is moderate (π=0.3%), only three-fold higher than in human. Here, we present a pedigree-based estimation of the mutation rate in this species. Based on whole-genome sequencing of four parents and 12 offspring, the estimated mutation rate is 2.0 x 10-9 per base per generation. We observed a high degree of parental mosaicism indicating that a large fraction of these de novo mutations occurred during early germ cell development. The estimated mutation rate - the lowest among vertebrates analyzed to date - partially explains the discrepancy between the rather low nucleotide diversity in herring and its huge census population size. But a species like the herring will never reach its expected nucleotide diversity because of fluctuations in population size over the millions of years it takes to build up high nucleotide diversity.
Data availability
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Moderate nucleotide diversity in the Atlantic herring is associated with a low mutation ratePublicly available at NCBI BioProject (accession no: PRJNA356817).
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
European Research Council (Bateson)
- Leif Andersson
Norwegian Research Council (254774)
- Arild Folkvord
- Leif Andersson
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2017, Feng et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Moderate nucleotide diversity in the Atlantic herring is associated with a low mutation rate
eLife 6:e23907.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.23907
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