The Genome as an Evolutionary Timepiece
| Autor: | Luana S. F. Lins, Simon Y. W. Ho, David A. Duchêne, Amanda X. Y. Chen, Nathan Lo |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
0301 basic medicine
Context (language use) Biology Genome DNA sequencing Protein evolution Evolution Molecular 03 medical and health sciences Biological Clocks Genetics Animals Humans Molecular clock molecular dating Ecology Evolution Behavior and Systematics Molecular dating phylogenetic analysis Genetic data molecular clock 030104 developmental biology Evolutionary biology evolutionary rate Microsatellite genomic data Perspectives |
| Zdroj: | Genome Biology and Evolution |
| ISSN: | 1759-6653 |
| Popis: | The molecular clock is a valuable and widely used tool for estimating evolutionary rates and timescales in biological research. There has been considerable progress in the theory and practice of molecular clocks over the past five decades. Although the idea of a molecular clock was originally put forward in the context of protein evolution and advanced using various biochemical techniques, it is now primarily applied to analyses of DNA sequences. An interesting but very underappreciated aspect of molecular clocks is that they can be based on genetic data other than DNA or protein sequences. For example, evolutionary timescales can be estimated using microsatellites, protein folds, and even the extent of recombination. These genome features hold great potential for molecular dating, particularly in cases where nucleotide sequences might be uninformative or unreliable. Here we present an outline of the different genetic data types that have been used for molecular dating, and we describe the features that good molecular clocks should possess. We hope that our article inspires further work on the genome as an evolutionary timepiece. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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