Additive Uncorrelated Relaxed Clock Models for the Dating of Genomic Epidemiology Phylogenies.

ABSTRACT: Phylogenetic dating is one of the most powerful and commonly used methods of drawing epidemiological interpretations from pathogen genomic data. Building such trees requires considering a molecular clock model which represents the rate at which substitutions accumulate on genomes. When the molecular clock rate is constant throughout the tree then the clock is said to be strict, but this is often not an acceptable assumption. Alternatively, relaxed clock models consider variations in the clock rate, often based on a distribution of rates for each branch. However, we show here that the distributions of rates across branches in commonly used relaxed clock models are incompatible with the biological expectation that the sum of the numbers of substitutions on two neighboring branches should be

SUBMITTER: Didelot X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8480190 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature