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Determining Divergence Times of the Major Kingdoms of Living Organisms with a Protein Clock
Abstract
Amino acid sequence data from 57 different enzymes were used to determine the divergence times of the major biological groupings. Deuterostomes and protostomes split about 670 million years ago and plants, animals, and fungi last shared a common ancestor about a billion years ago. With regard to these protein sequences, plants are slightly more similar to animals than are the fungi. In contrast, phylogenetic analysis of the same sequences indicates that fungi and animals shared a common ancestor more recently than either did with plants, the greater difference resulting from the fungal lineage changing faster than the animal and plant lines over the last 965 million years. The major protist lineages have been changing at a somewhat faster rate than other eukaryotes and split off about 1230 million years ago. If the rate of change has been approximately constant, then prokaryotes and eukaryotes last shared a common ancestor about 2 billion years ago, archaebacterial sequences being measurably more similar to eukaryotic ones than are eubacterial ones.
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“Some seem to contradict other lines of evidence, such as the study that produced a molecular date estimate for the split between kingdoms that is markedly younger than the earliest fossils 47 .”
From The modern molecular clock (2003) · cites this paper as [47]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Doolittle, R. F., Feng, D.-F., Tsang, S., Cho, G., & Little, E.
- Affiliations
- University of California San Diego (US)
- Corresponding author
- Doolittle, Russell F.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 1996-01-26
- Volume
- 271
- Issue
- 5248
- Pages
- 470-477
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W1970473208
- Cited by
- 581
- References
- 48
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 18 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 12 · 2016: 10 · 2015: 16 · 2014: 21 · 2013: 14 · 2012: 10
- FWCI
- 22.28
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Science (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (HL 26873)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics › Protist diversity and phylogeny
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Paleontology › Evolution and Paleontology Studies
- Keywords
- divergence time, molecular clock, amino acid substitution rates, protein sequences, enzyme sequence, eukaryotic origin, archaea, eukaryotic phylogeny
- MeSH terms
- Cyanobacteria, Amino Acid Sequence, Animals, Archaea, Bacteria, Enzymes, Eukaryotic Cells, Fossils, Fungi, Humans, Phylogeny, Plants, Prokaryotic Cells, Sequence Alignment, Evolution, Molecular
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