Bedrock radioactivity influences the rate and spectrum of mutation
- Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France
- Université Clermont-Auvergne, France
- Institut Français de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de la Mer (IFREMER), France
- Université de Lyon, Université Claude Bernard, CNRS UMR 5558, France
Abstract
All organisms on Earth are exposed to low doses of natural radioactivity but some habitats are more radioactive than others. Yet, documenting the influence of natural radioactivity on the evolution of biodiversity is challenging. Here, we addressed whether organisms living in naturally more radioactive habitats accumulate more mutations across generations using 14 species of waterlice living in subterranean habitats with contrasted levels of radioactivity. We found that the mitochondrial and nuclear mutation rates across a waterlouse species' genome increased on average by 60 and 30%, respectively, when radioactivity increased by a factor of three. We also found a positive correlation between the level of radioactivity and the probability of G to T (and complementary C to A) mutations, a hallmark of oxidative stress. We conclude that even low doses of natural bedrock radioactivity influence the mutation rate possibly through the accumulation of oxidative damage, in particular in the mitochondrial genome.
Data availability
- 16S sequences have been deposited on the European Nucleotide Archive and are available under the accession numbers from LR214526 to LR214880 (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/data/view/LR214526-LR214880).- Alignments and the list of genes used to compute synonymous substitutionrate have been deposited on Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/deposit/2563829).-Transcriptome reads have been deposited on the European Nucleotide Archive and are available under accession numbers from LR536601 to LR536626 in the study ID PRJEB14193 (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/data/search?query=PRJEB14193).- Number of reads and data used for correlations, namely measures of radionuclides and mutations counts have been deposited on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4071754).
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Bedrock radioactivity influences the rate and spectrum of mutation - Orthologous genesZenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.2563829.
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Aselloidea isopods Sanger sequencingENA, Project:PRJEB30668.
Article and author information
Author details
Nathanaëlle Saclier
Christophe J Douady
Funding
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (STYGOMICS - Défi enviromix)
- Patrick Chardon
- Florian Malard
- Lara Konecny-Dupré
- Tristan Lefebure
- Christophe J Douady
Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR- 15-CE32-0005 Convergenomix)
- Lara Konecny-Dupré
- Laurent Duret
- Tristan Lefebure
- Christophe J Douady
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, Saclier 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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Bedrock radioactivity influences the rate and spectrum of mutation
eLife 9:e56830.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.56830
Further reading
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