title: The changing face of the molecular evolutionary clock.
abstract: The molecular clock has played an important role in biological research, both as a description of the evolutionary process and as a tool for inferring evolutionary timescales. Genomic data have provided valuable insights into the molecular clock, allowing the patterns and causes of evolutionary rate variation to be characterized in increasing detail. I explain how genome sequences offer exciting opportunities for estimating the timescale of the Tree of Life. I describe the different approaches that have been used to deal with the computational and statistical challenges encountered in molecular clock analyses of genomic data. Finally, I offer a perspective on the future of molecular clocks, highlighting some of the key limitations and the most promising research directions.
authors.affiliation: School of Biological Sciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia. Electronic address: simon.ho@sydney.edu.au.
authors.forename: Simon Y W
authors.initials: SY
authors.lastname: Ho
mesh_terms: D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D040961:Genetic Drift; D023281:Genomics; D008957:Models, Genetic; D059645:Mutation Rate; D010802:Phylogeny; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA
keywords: genomic data; molecular clock; pacemaker models; phylogenetic analysis; rate heterogeneity