Sentences with phrase «accumulate mutations quickly»

There, with help from Wasser and his colleagues in Seattle, geneticist Al Roca sequenced introns — vestigial sections of DNA from the nucleus that accumulate mutations quickly because they don't code for any physical traits — and confirmed that forest and savanna elephants diverged at least 2.6 million and probably more than 3 million years ago — long enough to render them separate species.

Not exact matches

Harmful mutations usually die out quickly, so they don't interfere with the process of beneficial mutations accumulating.

But the virus quickly develops resistance; multiplying at a rate of several generations a day, these tiny pathogens rapidly accumulate genetic mutations.