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MBE Advance Access published online on September 7, 2006
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msl107
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© The Author 2006. 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@oxfordjournals.org
Accepted September 1, 2006

Letter

Can Deleterious Mutations Explain the Time Dependency of Molecular Rate Estimates?

Michael Woodhams 1 *

1 Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, Massey University, New Zealand

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Michael Woodhams, E-mail: m.d.woodhams{at}massey.ac.nz


  Abstract

It has recently been observed by Ho et al. that apparent rates of molecular evolution increase when measured over short timespans. I investigate whether the data are explainable purely by deleterious mutations. I derive an empirical approximation for the persistence of these mutations in a randomly mating population, and hence derive lower limits on effective population sizes. These limits are high, and get higher if additional reasonable assumptions are made. This casts doubt on whether deleterious mutations are able to explain the apparent rate acceleration.

Keywords: deleterious mutation; nearly neutral evolution; mutation rate; substitution rate; rate calibration.
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