TY - JOUR T1 - Quiescence unveils a novel mutational force in fission yeast JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/126755 SP - 126755 AU - Serge Gangloff AU - Guillaume Achaz AU - Adrien Villain AU - Samia Miled AU - Claire Denis AU - Benoit Arcangioli Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/11/126755.abstract N2 - One Sentence Summary The quiescence-driven mutational landscape reveals a novel evolutionary force.Abstract During cell division, the spontaneous mutation rate is expressed as the probability of mutations per generation, whereas during quiescence it will be expressed per unit of time. In this study, we report that during quiescence, the unicellular haploid fission yeast accumulates mutations as a linear function of time. We determined that 3 days of quiescence generate a number of invalidating mutations equivalent to that of one round of DNA replication. The novel mutational landscape of quiescence is characterized by insertion/deletion accumulating as fast as single nucleotide variants, and elevated amounts of deletions. When we extended the study to 3 months of quiescence, we confirmed the replication-independent mutational spectrum at the whole-genome level of a clonally aged population and uncovered phenotypic variations that subject the cells to natural selection. Thus, our results support the idea that genomes continuously evolve under two alternating phases that will impact on their size and composition. ER -