Mutation rate of bacteriophage ΦX174 modified through changes in GATC sequence context.

Bacteriophage ΦX174 has a relatively high mutation rate of 10⁻⁶ substitutions per nucleotide per strand copying. A thirty-fold reduction in the mutation rate was achieved by introducing seven GATC sequences in its genome. This motif allows for methyl-directed mismatch repair and is strongly avoided in nature by ΦX174 and other phages.