title: Fast and slow implementations of relaxed-clock methods show similar patterns of accuracy in estimating divergence times.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Center for Evolutionary Medicine and Informatics, The Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University, USA.
authors.forename: Fabia U
authors.initials: FU
authors.lastname: Battistuzzi
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Billing-Ross
authors.forename: Aditya
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Paliwal
authors.forename: Sudhir
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kumar
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D010802:Phylogeny; D016415:Sequence Alignment; D012984:Software