University of Michigan
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Professor Alex Kondrashov wrote a News & Views in the journal Nature titled “Genetics: The rate of human mutation,” about an article in the August 22, 2012 issue that suggests a link between an increasing number of older fathers and the rise in disorders such as autism.

The article, “Rate of de novo mutations and the importance of father’s age to disease risk,” was a comprehensive analysis of human spontaneous mutation that revealed a strong influence of paternal age on the rise in disorders.

As a result, Kondrashov was interviewed by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Economist and several television networks about the study. While not currently working on this subject, in 2003 he published a paper in the journal Human Mutation, based on Mendelian human diseases which produced essentially the same estimates for the four key parameters of spontaneous nucleotide substitution as the new large-scale study.

“This new study is important because the data were obtained by direct mother-father-offspring genome sequence comparison -- which can hardly be wrong,” said Kondrashov.