molecular clock
Sign in to savetechnique to deduce the time in prehistory when two or more life forms diverged
Wikidata facts
- Part of
- molecular evolution
Show 1 more fact
- different from
- chemical clock
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~16 min read
Encyclopedic overview
The molecular clock is a figurative term for a technique that uses the mutation rate of biomolecules to deduce the time in prehistory when two or more life forms diverged. The biomolecular data used for such calculations are usually nucleotide sequences for DNA, RNA, or amino acid sequences for proteins.
Early discovery and genetic equidistance
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “molecular clock” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.