A low rate of simultaneous double-nucleotide mutations in primates

The occurrence of double-nucleotide (doublet) mutations is contrary to the normal assumption that point mutations affect single nucleotides. Here we develop a new method for estimating the doublet mutation rate and apply it to more than a megabase of human-chimpanzee-baboon genomic DNA alignments and more than a million human single-nucleotide polymorphisms. The new method accounts for the effect of regional variation in evolutionary rates, which may be a confounding factor in previous estimates of the doublet mutation rate. Furthermore we determine sequence context effects by using sequence comparisons over a variety of lineage lengths. This approach yields a new estimate of the doublet mutation rate of 0.3% of the singleton rate, indicating that doublet mutations are far rarer than previously thought. Our results suggest that doublet mutations are unlikely to have caused the correlation between synonymous and nonsynonymous substitution rates in mammals, and also show that regional variation and sequence context effects play an important role in primate DNA sequence evolution.