DNA strand biases and the mutational resilience of genes

This paper quantifies the resilience of a gene to each class of base substitution. The resilience of a gene is defined as the set of probabilities of synonymous base substitution (one for each type of base substitution on each DNA strand), and is derived from the fraction of all possible substitutions which result in no change of encoded amino acids. We discuss the resilience of the common mutational target genes, lacI and hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase (hprt), and the p53 tumour suppressor gene. There are inherent strand biases to mutation in terms of the resilience differences between the non-template and template DNA strands. The ability to quantify resilience differences between the two DNA strands contributes to our understanding of strand bias to mutation.