Estimation of divergence times from multiprotein sequences for a few mammalian species and several distantly related organisms.

ABSTRACT: When many protein sequences are available for estimating the time of divergence between two species, it is customary to estimate the time for each protein separately and then use the average for all proteins as the final estimate. However, it can be shown that this estimate generally has an upward bias, and that an unbiased estimate is obtained by using distances based on concatenated sequences. We have shown that two concatenation-based distances, i.e., average gamma distance weighted with sequence length (d(2)) and multiprotein gamma distance (d(3)), generally give more satisfactory results than other concatenation-based distances. Using these two distance measures for 104 protein sequences, we estimated the time of divergence between mice and rats to be approximately 33 million years ag

SUBMITTER: Nei M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC30166 | biostudies-literature | 2001 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature