Hyper Human Mutation

Each human walking this planet receives approximately 60 new mutations in our genome from our parents, according to the first-ever direct measure of new mutations coming from mother and father in whole human genomes.

New mutations are the ultimate source from which new variation is drawn. But finding new mutations is extremely technically challenging as, on average, only 1 in every 100 million letters of DNA is altered each generation. Previous measures of the mutation rate in humans has either averaged across both sexes or measured over several generations. There has been no measure of the new mutations passed from a specific parent to a child among multiple individuals or families.

They sorted the mutations into those that occurred during the production of sperm or eggs of the parents and those that may have occurred during the life of the child: it is the mutation rate in sperm or eggs that is important in evolution. Remarkably, in one family 92 percent of the mutations derived from the father, whereas in the other family only 36 percent were from the mother.

Using new techniques and algorithms, we can look at more families to answer these new riddles, and address such issues as the impact of parental age and different environment exposures on rates of new mutations, which might concern any would be parent.

The number of mutations passed on from a parent to a child varied between parents by as much as tenfold. A person with a high natural mutation rate might be at greater risk of misdiagnosis of a genetic disease because the samples used for diagnosis might contain mutations that are not present in other cells in their body (most of their cells would be unaffected).

Source from: Wikipedia