Temporal Patterns of Fruit Fly (Drosophila) Evolution Revealed by Mutation Clocks

• DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msg236
• Publication Date: 2004-02-12T01:22:28Z
• Authors: K. Tamura
• Keywords: Molecular clock; Mutation Accumulation

Drosophila melanogaster has been a canonical model organism to study genetics, development, behavior, physiology, evolution, and population genetics for nearly century. Despite this emphasis the completion of its nuclear genome sequence, timing major speciation events leading origin fruit fly remain elusive because paucity extensive fossil records biogeographic data. Use molecular clocks as an alternative fraught with non-clock-like accumulation nucleotide amino-acid substitutions. Here we present novel methodology in which genomic mutation distances are used overcome these limitations make use all available gene sequence data constructing time scale. Our analysis 2977 pairwise comparisons from 176 genes reveals long-term clock ticking at rate 11.1 mutations per kilobase pair Myr. Genomic clock–based timings landmark evolution D. show that it shared most recent common ancestry 5.4 MYA simulans, 12.6 erecta+D. orena, 12.8 yakuba+D. teisseri, 35.6 takahashii subgroup, 41.3 montium 44.2 ananassae 54.9 obscura group, 62.2 willistoni 62.9 subgenus Drosophila. These other estimates compatible those known limited records. The inferred temporal pattern shows correspondence cooling patterns paleoclimate changes habitat fragmentation Cenozoic.