Estimating the age of the common ancestor of a sample of DNA sequences
Open Access
- 1 February 1997
- journal article
- Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in Molecular Biology and Evolution
- Vol. 14 (2) , 195-199
- https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.molbev.a025753
Abstract
We present a simple Monte Carlo method for estimating the age of the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of a sample of DNA sequences. We show that Templeton's (1993) estimator of the age of the MRCA based on the maximum number of nucleotide differences between two sequences in a sample is inaccurate, and we demonstrate the new method by reanalyzing a sample of DNA sequences from human Y chromosomes and a sample of human Alu sequences.Keywords
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