miRNA & mutational robustness

Szollosi GJ & Derenyi I 2009 Congruent evolution of genetic and environmental robustness in micro-RNA. Mol Biol Evol 26:867-874.

• theoretical results indicate that the direct evolution of robustness requires high mutation rates and/or large effective population sizes only found among RNA viruses, not multicellular eukaryotes
• sampling method used by Borenstein and Ruppin introduced significant bias that lead to an overestimation of robustness
• this correlation strongly suggests that genetic robustness observed in miRNA sequences is the byproduct of selection for environmental robustness