Strand asymmetries in DNA evolution

Abstract

The complementary strands of DNA differ with respect to replication and transcription. Both of these processes are asymmetric and can bias the occurrence of mutations between the strands: during replication, the discontinuous lagging strand undergoes certain errors at higher rates, and transcription overexposes the nontranscribed strand to DNA damage while targeting repair enzymes to the transcribed strand. While biases introduced during replication apparently have little impact on sequence evolution, the effects of transcription are observed in the asymmetric patterns of substitution in bacterial genes and might be influencing genome-wide patterns of base composition.