A mechanistic evolutionary model explains the time-dependent pattern of substitution rates in viruses.

ABSTRACT: Estimating viral timescales is fundamental in understanding the evolutionary biology of viruses. Molecular clocks are widely used to reveal the recent evolutionary histories of viruses but may severely underestimate their longer-term origins because of the inverse correlation between inferred rates of evolution and the timescale of their measurement. Here, we provide a predictive mechanistic model that readily explains the rate decay phenomenon over a wide range of timescales and recapitulates the ubiquitous power-law rate decay with a slope of -0.65. We show that standard substitution models fail to correctly estimate divergence times once the most rapidly evolving sites saturate, typically after hundreds of years in RNA viruses and thousands of years in DNA viruses. Our model successfull

SUBMITTER: Ghafari M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8585505 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature