Evolutionary Distance

Wen‐Hsiung Li, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Published online: July 2006

DOI: 10.1038/npg.els.0005107

Evolutionary distance refers to the cumulative evolutionary change between two DNA or protein sequences that were derived from a common ancestral sequence.

Keywords: distance measures; substitution models; distance estimation; nucleotide substitution; amino acid substitution

Figure 1. (a) One-parameter model of nucleotide substitution. In this model, the rate of substitution in each direction is substitutions per site per unit time. (b) Two-parameter model of nucleotide substitution. In this model, the rate of transition () may not be equal to the rate of each of the two types of transversion ().
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 References
    book Jukes TH and Cantor CR (1969) "Evolution of protein molecules". In: Munro HN (ed.) Mammalian Protein Metabolism, pp. 21–123. New York: Academic Press
    book Kimura (1980) The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution. New York: Cambridge University Press.
    book Li WH (1997) Molecular Evolution. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.
    book Nei M and Kumar S (2000) Molecular Evolution and Phylogenetics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Related Sub-Topics:

Molecular Evolution | Protein Evolution | Evolution of Coding and Functional Modules
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Article Title: Evolutionary Distance
 
How to Cite close
Li, Wen‐Hsiung(Jul 2006) Evolutionary Distance. In: eLS. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester. http://www.els.net [doi: 10.1038/npg.els.0005107]