The Genome as an Evolutionary Timepiece

The molecular clock is a valuable and widely used tool for estimating evolutionary rates and timescales in biological research. There has been considerable progress in the theory and practice of molecular clocks over the past five decades. Although the idea of a molecular clock was originally put forward in the context of protein evolution and advanced using various biochemical techniques, it is now primarily applied to analyses of DNA sequences. An interesting but very underappreciated aspect of molecular clocks is that they can be based on genetic data other than DNA or protein sequences. For example, evolutionary timescales can be estimated using microsatellites, protein folds, and even the extent of recombination. These genome features hold great potential for molecular dating, particularly in cases where nucleotide sequences might be uninformative or unreliable. Here we present an outline of the different genetic data types that have been used for molecular dating, and we describe the features that good molecular clocks should possess. We hope that our article inspires further work on the genome as an evolutionary timepiece.