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Smoking gun for a rare mutation mechanism

In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick proposed that rarely formed isomers of DNA bases cause spontaneous mutations to occur during the copying of DNA. Sixty-five years later, it looks as though they were right.
  1. Myron F. Goodman

    1. Myron F. Goodman is in the Molecular and Computational Biology Program, Departments of Biological Science and Chemistry, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA.

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How do mutations arise when DNA is copied in cells? In a paper in Nature, Kimsey et al.1 combine observations of DNA structure with measurements of enzyme kinetics and computational modelling to provide a definitive explanation of a seminal mechanism.

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Nature 554, 180-181 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-00418-6

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