Emerson Brent C, Hickerson Michael J
Island Ecology and Evolution Research Group, Instituto de Productos Naturales y Agrobiología (IPNA-CSIC), C/Astrofísico Francisco Sánchez 3, La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands, 38206, Spain.
Mol Ecol. 2015 Feb;24(4):702-9. doi: 10.1111/mec.13070.
There is increasing momentum surrounding the hypothesis that rates of molecular evolution between individuals within contemporary populations are high, and that these rates decrease as a function of time, perhaps over several millions of years, before reaching stationarity. The implications of this are powerful, potentially reshaping our view of how climate history impacts upon both species distribution patterns and the geographic structuring of genetic variation within species. However, our assessment of the hypothesis reveals a lack of theoretical support and empirical evidence for hypothesized magnitudes of time-dependent rates of molecular evolution, with much of the apparent rate changes coming from artefacts and biases inherent in the methods of rate estimation. Our assessment also reveals a problem with how serial sampling is implemented for mutation rate estimation using ancient DNA samples, rendering published estimates unreliable.
有一种假说正获得越来越多的支持，即当代种群中个体间的分子进化速率很高，并且这些速率会随着时间推移而降低，可能在数百万年的时间里逐渐降低，直至达到平稳状态。这一假说的影响极为重大，有可能重塑我们对于气候历史如何影响物种分布模式以及物种内遗传变异的地理结构的看法。然而，我们对该假说的评估表明，对于分子进化的时间依赖性速率的假设幅度，缺乏理论支持和实证证据，许多明显的速率变化源自速率估计方法中固有的人为因素和偏差。我们的评估还揭示了在使用古代DNA样本进行突变率估计时，连续抽样的实施方式存在问题，这使得已发表的估计结果不可靠。
