Resume

• 2002

  PhD

  Evolutionary biology and Astrobiology

• Genomics

  Genetics

  Science

  Fast and Slow Implementations of Relaxed-Clock Methods Show Similar Patterns of Accuracy in Estimating Divergence Times

  Sudhir Kumar

  Paul Billing-Ross

  Phylogenetic analyses are using increasingly larger data sets for estimating divergence times. With this increase in data sizes

  the computation time required is becoming a bottleneck in evolutionary investigations. Our recent study of two relaxed-clock programs (BEAST and MultiDivTime [MDT]) showed their usefulness in time estimation; however

  they place a significant computational time burden on biologists even for moderately small data sets. Here

  we report speed and accuracy of another relaxed-clock program (MCMCTree

  MC2T). We find it to be much faster than both MDT and BEAST while producing comparable time estimates. These results will encourage the analysis of larger data sets as well as the evaluation of the robustness of estimated times to changes in the model of evolutionary rates and clock calibrations.

  Fast and Slow Implementations of Relaxed-Clock Methods Show Similar Patterns of Accuracy in Estimating Divergence Times

  Fabia Ursula

  Battistuzzi

  Oakland University

  Oakland Univeristy

  Arizona State University

  Arizona State University

  Assistant Professor

  Oakland University

  Associate Professor

  Oakland Univeristy