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MBE Advance Access published online on September 8, 2005
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msj006
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org
Accepted August 30, 2005

Letter

The "Inverse Relationship Between Evolutionary Rate and age of Mammalian Genes" is an Artifact of Increased Genetic Distance with Rate of Evolution and Time of Divergence

Eran Elhaik 1 *, Niv Sabath 1 *, and Dan Graur 1*

1 Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Dan Graur, E-mail: dgraur{at}uh.edu


  Abstract

It has recently been claimed that older genes tend to evolve more slowly than newer ones (Alba and Castresana, 2005). By simulation of genes of equal age, we show that the inverse correlation between age and rate is an artifact caused by our inability to detect homology when evolutionary distances are large. Since evolutionary distance increases with time of divergence and rate of evolution, homologs of fast evolving genes are frequently undetected in distantly related taxa and are, hence, misclassified as "new." This misclassification causes the mean genetic distance of "new" genes to be overestimated, and the mean genetic distance of "old" genes to be underestimated.

*E.E. and N.S. contributed equally to this work and are to be considered co-first authors.


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