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Updated: Aug 26, 2025

Presynaptically Silent Synapses Studied with Light Microscopy
Published on: January 4, 2010
[Silent - but not neutral!]
1Biologiste, généticien et immunologiste, président d'Aprogène (Association pour la promotion de la génomique), 13007 Marseille, France.
Abstract:
An ingenious system for generating thousands of point mutations in yeast genes and measuring their effect on fitness shows convincingly that, for the chosen subset of representative non-essential genes, silent mutations have as much effect on fitness as missense mutations. In other words, silent mutations are not neutral, at least under these conditions. This result has important implications for evolutionary biology.
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