ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2004
The timing of eukaryotic evolution: does a relaxed molecular clock reconcile proteins and fossils?
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2004. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 210 papers.
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210 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Whole Genome Duplication in the Genomics Era: The Hidden Gems in Invertebrates?Genome biology and evolution · 2025Review
- RNA-Binding S1 Domain in Bacterial, Archaeal and Eukaryotic Proteins as One of the Evolutionary Markers of Symbiogenesis.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Article
- Comparative genomics of Metarhizium brunneum strains V275 and ARSEF 4556: unraveling intraspecies diversity.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2024Article
- Evolutionary conserved peptide and glycoprotein hormone-like neuroendocrine systems in C. elegans.Molecular and cellular endocrinology · 2024Article
- Morphological ant mimics: constrained to imperfection?Biology letters · 2024Article
- Linear motifs regulating protein secretion, sorting and autophagy in Leishmania parasites are diverged with respect to their host equivalents.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- A phylogenetic profiling approach identifies novel ciliogenesis genes in Drosophila and C. elegans.The EMBO journal · 2023Article
- Changing course: Glucose starvation drives nuclear accumulation of Hexokinase 2 in S. cerevisiae.PLoS genetics · 2023Article
- Phycobilisomes and Phycobiliproteins in the Pigment Apparatus of Oxygenic Photosynthetics: From Cyanobacteria to Tertiary Endosymbiosis.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
- Article
- The origin of eukaryotes and rise in complexity were synchronous with the rise in oxygen.Frontiers in bioinformatics · 2023Article
- Physiological analysis and transcriptome sequencing of a delayed-green leaf mutant 'Duojiao' of ornamental crabapple (Physiology and molecular biology of plants : an international journal of functional plant biology · 2022Article
150 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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5 authors.
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Abstract
The use of nucleotide and amino acid sequences allows improved understanding of the timing of evolutionary events of life on earth. Molecular estimates of divergence times are, however, controversial and are generally much more ancient than suggested by the fossil record. The limited number of genes and species explored and pervasive variations in evolutionary rates are the most likely sources of such discrepancies. Here we compared concatenated amino acid sequences of 129 proteins from 36 eukaryotes to determine the divergence times of several major clades, including animals, fungi, plants, and various protists. Due to significant variations in their evolutionary rates, and to handle the uncertainty of the fossil record, we used a Bayesian relaxed molecular clock simultaneously calibrated by six paleontological constraints. We show that, according to 95% credibility intervals, the eukaryotic kingdoms diversified 950-1,259 million years ago (Mya), animals diverged from choanoflagellates 761-957 Mya, and the debated age of the split between protostomes and deuterostomes occurred 642-761 Mya. The divergence times appeared to be robust with respect to prior assumptions and paleontological calibrations. Interestingly, these relaxed clock time estimates are much more recent than those obtained under the assumption of a global molecular clock, yet bilaterian diversification appears to be approximately 100 million years more ancient than the Cambrian boundary.
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