Single-nucleotide mutation rate increases close to insertions/deletions in eukaryotes

Recent genomic efforts have demonstrated that large chunks of DNA differ between individuals in many species, and that the differences are focused on mutation hot-spots. Six pairwise comparisons of the distributions of single nucleotide substitutions around insertions and deletions ('indels') using ten genomes including yeast, rice, fly, rodent and primate show that the level of genetic variation is strongly and negatively correlated with the distance from indels in all the comparisons. Furthermore, the size and abundance of indels significantly influences the level of local nucleotide diversity. This work suggests that indels are a common mechanism to induce mutations, and may play an important role in genome evolution.