Can Deleterious Mutations Explain the Time Dependency of Molecular Rate Estimates?

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Abstract
It has recently been observed by Ho et al. (Ho SYW, Phillips MJ, Cooper A, Drummond AJ. 2005. Time dependency of molecular rate estimates and systematic overestimation of recent divergence times. Mol Biol Evol. 22(7):1561–1568) that apparent rates of molecular evolution increase when measured over short timespans. I investigate whether the data are explainable purely by deleterious mutations. I derive an empirical approximation for the persistence of these mutations in a randomly mating population and, hence, derive lower limits on effective population sizes. These limits are high and get higher if additional reasonable assumptions are made. This casts doubt on whether deleterious mutations are able to explain the apparent rate acceleration.