N. Saitou et S. Ueda, EVOLUTIONARY RATES OF INSERTION AND DELETION IN NONCODING NUCLEOTIDE-SEQUENCES OF PRIMATES, Molecular biology and evolution, 11(3), 1994, pp. 504-512
Insertions and deletions are responsible for gaps in aligned nucleotid
e sequences, but they have been usually ignored when the number of nuc
leotide substitutions was estimated. We compared six sets of nuclear a
nd mitochondrial noncoding DNA sequences of primates and obtained the
estimates of the evolutionary rate of insertion and deletion. The maxi
mum-parsimony principle was applied to locate insertions and deletions
on a given phylogenetic tree. Deletions were about twice as frequent
as insertions for nuclear DNA, and single-nucleotide insertions and de
letions were the most frequent in all events. The rate of insertion an
d deletion was found to be rather constant among branches of the phylo
genetic tree, and the rate (similar to 2.0/kb/Myr) for mitochondrial D
NA was found to be much higher than that (similar to 0.2/kb/Myr) for n
uclear DNA. The rates of nucleotide substitution were about 10 times h
igher than the rate of insertion and deletion for both nuclear and mit
ochondrial DNA.