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The Scripps Research Institute finding counters prevailing thought that the virus would require multiple mutations before it poses a threat to public health.
In asexual species, the effects of mutation accumulation are more significant compared to sexual species.In an asexual population, all the individual species are equally affected by the selective pressures from the environment, which includes, deleterious and/or beneficial mutations.
The typical human genome also contains 40,000 to 200,000 rare variants observed in less than 0.5% of the population that can only have occurred from at least one de novo germline mutation in the history of human evolution. [142] De novo mutations have also been researched as playing a crucial role in the persistence of genetic disease in humans.
Incidental, or natural mutations occur through errors during replication and repair, either spontaneously or due to environmental stressors. Intentional modifications are done in a laboratory for various purposes, developing hardier seeds and plants, and increasingly to treat human disease. The use of gene editing technology remains controversial.
What could happen if avian flu crosses the species barrier?
In nature, the mutations that arise may be beneficial or deleterious—this is the driving force of evolution. An organism may acquire new traits through genetic mutation, but mutation may also result in impaired function of the genes and, in severe cases, causes the death of the organism.
This is because the BRCA mutations also result in a severe subtype of Fanconi anemia (FA-S for BRCA1, FA-D1 for BRCA2), itself an extremely rare medical condition. Another example of a recessive lethal allele occurs in the Manx cat. Manx cats possess a heterozygous mutation resulting in a shortened or missing tail.
Genetic pollution is a term for uncontrolled [1] [2] gene flow into wild populations. It is defined as "the dispersal of contaminated altered genes from genetically engineered organisms to natural organisms, esp. by cross-pollination", [3] but has come to be used in some broader ways.