Empirical relationship between the number of nucleotide substitutions and interspecific identity of amino acid sequences in some proteins

Masatoshi Nei, Ranajit Chakraborty

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

There are three different methods of estimating the number of nucleotide substitutions between a pair of species from amino acid sequence data, i.e. the Poisson correction method, random evolutionary hit method, and counting the actual but minimum number of nucleotide substitutions. In this paper the relationships among the estimates obtained by these methods are studied empirically. The results obtained indicate that there is a high correlation among these estimates and in practice any of the three methods may be used for constructing evolutionary trees or relating nucleotide substitutions to evolutionary time. The effects of varying rates of nucleotide substitution among different sites on the Poisson correction and random evolutionary hit methods are also studied mathematically. It is shown that these two methods are quite insensitive to the variation of the rate of nucleotide substitution.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)313-323
Number of pages11
JournalJournal of Molecular Evolution
Volume7
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 1976

Keywords

  • Amino Acid Substitution
  • Evolutionary Tree
  • Molecular Evolution

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