Fraction of mutationally active genome

Model Organism: Worms Scientific Discussion
1

Hello everyone,

I have just started my PhD, and I have never worked with nematode data before, so please forgive my ignorance.

I am investigating mutational patterns in C. elegans, and I’ve got a question which I’m somehow unable to find an answer to in the literature.

Is there any general estimate of the genome fraction which is mutationally active? Or can mutations happen randomly across all 100 Mbps?

I’ve read that C. elegans has ~ half of intergenic DNA, and nearly quarter of introns and quarter of exons. Does it mean that more mutations will happen in the non-coding part?

Mutation rate per site is about 10^(-8), but I can not understand how many sites should I account for.

Thank you very much for any hints!

2

Hi, and welcome to the field!
I suggest you have a look through the mutation accumulation litterature:
Denver, Dee R, Krystalynne Morris, Michael Lynch, and W Kelley Thomas. 2004. “High Mutation Rate and Predominance of Insertions in the Caenorhabditis Elegans Nuclear Genome.” Nature 430 (August): 679–82.
Denver, Dee R, Dana K Howe, Larry J Wilhelm, Catherine a Palmer, Jennifer L Anderson, Kevin C Stein, Patrick C. Phillips, and Suzanne Estes. 2010. “Selective Sweeps and Parallel Mutation in the Adaptive Recovery from Deleterious Mutation in Caenorhabditis Elegans.” Genome Research 20 (12): 1663–71.