A comparison of two methods for constructing evolutionary distances from a weighted contribution of transition and transversion differences |
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Authors: | Pollock DD; Goldstein DB |
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Institution: | Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University of California 94305, USA. |
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Abstract: | 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.
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