Evolutionary distances corrected for purifying selection and ancestral polymorphisms.

Abstract Evolutionary distance formulas that take into account effects due to ancestral polymorphisms and purifying selection are obtained on the basis of the full solution of Jukes–Cantor and Kimura DNA substitution models. In the case of purifying selection two different methods are developed. It is shown that avoiding the dimensional reduction implicitly carried out in the conventional model solving is instrumental to incorporate the quoted effects into the formalism. The problem of estimating the numerical values of the model parameters, as well as those of the correction terms, is not addressed.