Molecular clock
Technique to deduce the time in prehistory when two or more life forms diverged / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Not to be confused with Chemical clock or Biological clock.
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.