7 November 2014
Joanna Masel
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
University of Arizona
Making genes into gene products is subject to predictable errors. Molecular errors in the present can mimic the effect of mutations in the future. This mimicry creates the potential for "pre-selection" on cryptic sequences that are currently expressed only in error, but that may be co-opted by future mutations. This has implications for the evolution of molecular error rates and for evolvability.