Bateman-Mukai method

In genetics, the Bateman–Mukai method, sometimes referred to as the Bateman–Mukai technique, is a traditional method used for describing the mutation rates for genes through the observation of physical traits (phenotype) of a living organism. The method involves the maintenance of many mutation accumulation lineages of the organism studied, and it is therefore labor intensive.

Origin

The foundational papers from which this method gets its name were conducted by geneticists A. J. Bateman in 1959 and T. Mukai in 1964. Bateman used an early form of this method to understand how radiation affects the survival of chromosomes due to radiation induced mutations. Mukai's experimental design largely followed the design of Bateman's study, but rather than inducing mutations via any external factor, the study aimed to describe the spontaneous naturally occurring deleterious mutation rate of the common fruit fly.

Procedure

The method requires the establishment of many mutation accumulation lineages using within line breeding of diploid organisms. These lines are maintained in a favorable environment for deleterious mutations to accumulate so that they are not to be purged by natural selection: excess food and other resources are kept available to eliminate competition, and the parents of the next generation are chosen at random without any regards to fitness. Importantly, in this way, mutation accumulation experiments attempt to describe the true mutation rates that would be observed in the absence of natural selection.

Asexually reproducing organisms can simply have a single parent selected as the parent for the next generation of each line. In sexually reproducing organisms, measures must be taken such that researchers can be sure that mutations are inherited by future generations of the mutation accumulation lines.