Skip Navigation

This Article
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in ISI Web of Science
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow Search for citing articles in:
ISI Web of Science (12)
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Pollock, D. D.
Right arrow Articles by Goldstein, D. B.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Pollock, D. D.
Right arrow Articles by Goldstein, D. B.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

Molecular Biology and Evolution, Vol 12, 713-717, Copyright © 1995 by Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

A comparison of two methods for constructing evolutionary distances from a weighted contribution of transition and transversion differences

DD Pollock and DB Goldstein
Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University of California 94305, USA.

Since the initial work of Jukes and Cantor (1969), a number of procedures have been developed to estimate the expected number of nucleotide substitutions corresponding to a given observed level of nucleotide differentiation assuming particular evolutionary models. Unlike the proportion of different sites, the expected number of substitutions that would have occurred grows linearly with time and therefore has had great appeal as an evolutionary distance. Recently, however, a number of authors have tried to develop improved statistical approaches for generating and evaluating evolutionary distances (Schoniger and von Haeseler 1993; Goldstein and Polock 1994; Tajima and Takezaki 1994). These studies clearly show that the estimated number of nucleotide substitutions is generally not the best estimator for use in reconstruction of phylogenetic relationships. The reason for this is that there is often a large error associated with the estimation of this number. Therefore, even though its expectation is correct (i.e., on average the expected number of substitutions is proportional to time- -but see Tajima 1993), it is not expected to be as useful as estimators designed to have a lower variance.
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Mol Biol EvolHome page
M. S. Rosenberg, S. Subramanian, and S. Kumar
Patterns of Transitional Mutation Biases Within and Among Mammalian Genomes
Mol. Biol. Evol., June 1, 2003; 20(6): 988 - 993.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Home page
 Mol Biol EvolHome page
D. D. Pollock and W. J. Bruno
Assessing an Unknown Evolutionary Process: Effect of Increasing Site-Specific Knowledge Through Taxon Addition
Mol. Biol. Evol., December 1, 2000; 17(12): 1854 - 1858.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Home page
 Mol Biol EvolHome page
W. J. Bruno, N. D. Socci, and A. L. Halpern
Weighted Neighbor Joining: A Likelihood-Based Approach to Distance-Based Phylogeny Reconstruction
Mol. Biol. Evol., January 1, 2000; 17(1): 189 - 197.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


Disclaimer:
Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.