ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2006
There is no universal molecular clock for invertebrates, but rate variation does not scale with body size.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2006. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed.
- Review
- Patterns and determinants of mitogenomic evolution in Bilateria.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Estimates of the Mutation Rate per Year Can Explain Why the Molecular Clock Depends on Generation Time.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Drivers of interlineage variability in mitogenomic evolutionary rates in Platyhelminthes.Heredity · 2024Article
- Mitogenomic evolutionary rates in bilateria are influenced by parasitic lifestyle and locomotory capacity.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Base Composition, Codon Usage, and Patterns of Gene Sequence Evolution in Butterflies.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Comparative Expression Profiling and Sequence Characterization of ATP1A1 Gene Associated with Heat Tolerance in Tropically Adapted Cattle.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Article
- Article
- Is reproductive strategy a key factor in understanding the evolutionary history of Southern Ocean Asteroidea (Echinodermata)?Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Evolutionary Associations of Endosymbiotic Ciliates Shed Light on the Timing of the Marsupial-Placental Split.Molecular biology and evolution · 2018Article
- The compact mitochondrial genome of Zorotypus medoensis provides insights into phylogenetic position of Zoraptera.BMC genomics · 2014Article
- Strong genetic structure corresponds to small-scale geographic breaks in the Australian alpine grasshopper Kosciuscola tristis.BMC evolutionary biology · 2014Article
- The marine diversity spectrum.The Journal of animal ecology · 2014Article
- Sequence exploration reveals information bias among molecular markers used in phylogenetic reconstruction for Colletotrichum species.SpringerPlus · 2014Article
- Evolutionary Modeling of Genotype-Phenotype Associations, and Application to Primate Coding and Non-coding mtDNA Rate Variation.Evolutionary bioinformatics online · 2013Article
- Animal mitochondria, positive selection and cyto-nuclear coevolution: insights from pulmonates.PloS one · 2013Article
- Article
- High rate of calculation errors in mismatch distribution analysis results in numerous false inferences of biological importance.Heredity · 2011Article
- Genome-scale phylogenetic function annotation of large and diverse protein families.Genome research · 2011Article
- Article
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The existence of a universal molecular clock has been called into question by observations that substitution rates vary widely between lineages. However, increasing empirical evidence for the systematic effects of different life history traits on the rate of molecular evolution has raised hopes that rate variation may be predictable, potentially allowing the "correction" of the molecular clock. One such example is the body size trend observed in vertebrates; smaller species tend to have faster rates of molecular evolution. This effect has led to the proposal of general predictive models correcting for rate heterogeneity and has also been invoked to explain discrepancies between molecular and paleontological dates for explosive radiations in the fossil record. Yet, there have been no tests of an effect in any nonvertebrate taxa. In this study, we have tested the generality of the body size effect by surveying a wide range of invertebrate metazoan lineages. DNA sequences and body size data were collected from the literature for 330 species across five phyla. Phylogenetic comparative methods were used to investigate a relationship between average body size and substitution rate at both interspecies and interfamily comparison levels. We demonstrate significant rate variation in all phyla and most genes examined, implying a strict molecular clock cannot be assumed for the Metazoa. Furthermore, we find no evidence of any influence of body size on invertebrate substitution rates. We conclude that the vertebrate body size effect is a special case, which cannot be simply extrapolated to the rest of the animal kingdom.
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