What is "transcribed strand" This is an excerpt from a paper: > T>C mutations at NpTpN trinucleotides, also found in hepatocellular carcinomas, shows strong transcriptional strand bias with more T>C mutations on the transcribed than untranscribed strands What exactly is meant by "transcribed" strand: the sense strand or the template strand ? I tried looking up for it but couldn't find any definition.

In my opinion they **should** mean the template strand, and they probably do. Perhaps if we had a link to the paper we could have examined the language more closely.

Here is a paper which uses the term in that sense:

> Mugal, CF _et al_. (2008) Transcription-Induced Mutational Strand Bias and Its Effect on Substitution Rates in Human Genes. Molecular Biology and Evolution 26,131-142

In the abstract (which I have linked to) the authors make a clear reference to the transcribed strand in contrast to the coding strand (i.e. the strand of DNA with the same sequence as the RNA transcript):

> All three [mutational rates] considered are found to be on average higher on the coding strand and lower on the transcribed strand...

There are also definitions confirming this at this Wikipedia page.