Implications of fluctuations in substitution rates: impact on the uncertainty of branch lengths and on relative-rate tests.

Abstract excerpt

Many tests of the lineage dependence of substitution rates, computations of the error of evolutionary distances, and simulations of molecular evolution assume that the rate of evolution is constant in time within each lineage descended from a common ancestor. However, estimates of the index of dispersion of numbers of mammalian substitutions suggest that the rate has time-dependent variations consistent with a...

Topics

• Amino Acid Substitution
• Animals
• Evolution, Molecular
• Genetic Variation
• Mathematics
• Models, Genetic
• Poisson Distribution