SALT LAKE CITY, March 10 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists say they've sequenced the genome of an entire family and found parents give their children fewer genetic mutations than had been thought.
The researchers, led by the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, said their landmark study is the first to look at the genome of an entire family.
The scientist said their findings enabled them to accurately estimate the average rate at which parents pass genetic mutations to their offspring and also identify precise locations where parental chromosomes exchange information that creates new combinations of genetic traits in their children.
The family included the parents' son and daughter. By comparing the parents' DNA sequences to those of their children, the researchers estimated with a high degree of certainty that each parent passes 30 mutations to their offspring. That contradicts a long-held estimate that each parent passes 75 gene mutations to their children.
"That's the kind of power you get from looking at the whole genome," said University of Utah Professor Lynn Jorde, who participated in the study. "The mutation rate was less than half of what we'd thought."
Although medical researchers say most mutations, as far as they know, have no consequence for a child's health, knowing the rate at which parents pass mutations to their offspring is critical information, Jorde said.
"The mutation rate is our clock, and every time it ticks we have a new genetic variant," he said. "We need to know how fast the clock ticks."
The research is detailed in the online journal Science Express ahead of print in the journal Science.
