this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
131 points (99.2% liked)
Biology
1581 readers
6 users here now
This is a general community to discuss of all things related to biology!
For a more specific community about asking questions to biologists, you can also visit:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm not sure about this particular paper, but usually you can compare the number of mutations in a common protein and use that to estimate how long ago a common ancestor existed. As an example here is a graph of the number of mutations in mitochondrial DNA for the protein Cytochrome C. The more mutations you accumulate in a genome the larger amount of time since they split from a common ancestor.