Intron Lengths Can Be Used as a Molecular Clock

Abstract

<p><i>y</i>-axis, magnitude of the Spearman correlation coefficient for the five <i>Drosophila</i> distributions shown in <a href="http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.0020015#pcbi-0020015-g008" target="_blank">Figure 8</a>. <i>x</i>-axis, time (millions of years) since last common ancestor based on protein similarities as calculated in [<a href="http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.0020015#pcbi-0020015-b030" target="_blank">30</a>]. Black bars above and below each data point denote observed variance in the data and were obtained by randomly resampling 1,000 orthologous intron pairs 100 times. Best-fitting curve (shown in black) y = −0.0057x + 0.9266; R² = 0.9875.</p