{"doi":"10.1007/s42995-020-00060-0","title":"The insect-killing bacterium Photorhabdus luminescens has the lowest mutation rate among bacteria","abstract":"Abstract Mutation is a primary source of genetic variation that is used to power evolution. Many studies, however, have shown that most mutations are deleterious and, as a result, extremely low mutation rates might be beneficial for survival. Using a mutation accumulation experiment, an unbiased method for mutation study, we found an extremely low base-substitution mutation rate of 5.94 × 10 –11 per nucleotide site per cell division (95% Poisson confidence intervals: 4.65 × 10 –11 , 7.48 × 10 –11 ) and indel mutation rate of 8.25 × 10 –12 per site per cell division (95% confidence intervals: 3.96 × 10 –12 , 1.52 × 10 –11 ) in the bacterium Photorhabdus luminescens ATCC29999. The mutations are strongly A/T-biased with a mutation bias of 10.28 in the A/T direction. It has been hypothesized that the ability for selection to lower mutation rates is inversely proportional to the effective population size (drift-barrier hypothesis) and we found that the effective population size of this bacterium is significantly greater than most other bacteria. This finding further decreases the lower-bounds of bacterial mutation rates and provides evidence that extreme levels of replication fidelity can evolve within organisms that maintain large effective population sizes.","journal":"Marine Life Science & Technology","year":2020,"id":81375,"datarank":0.40620753016533157,"base_score":2.70805020110221,"endowment":2.70805020110221,"self_citation_contribution":0.40620753016533157,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.40620753016533157,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":14,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9459,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":420728,"name":"Emily Williams","orcid":"0009-0004-1921-2617","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":420729,"name":"Way Sung","orcid":"0000-0002-8336-8913","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":337882,"name":"Michael Lynch","orcid":"0000-0002-1653-0642","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":337879,"name":"Hongan Long","orcid":"0000-0001-9767-8173","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":420727,"name":"Jiao Pan","orcid":"0000-0003-3849-2891","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":55,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-18T21:52:34.401799Z","pmid":"33791681","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}