The large difference between the two parameter sets lies mainly in the near 2-fold difference in mutation rate and the information content in the sequence data.
Simply put, if the product of the error (mutation) rate and the information capacity (genome size) is safely below one (i.e., less then one error per genome is expected to occur per replication cycle), most of the progeny will be exact copies of the parent, and reproduction of the system will be sustainable.
It represents the mutation rate beyond which the information in the molecules would be lost due to degeneracy.
However the error threshold is the genomic mutation rate beyond which the information in the molecules that compose the quasispecies loses sense due to mutational degeneracy [ 29].
Error threshold is the upper bound of the mutation rate such that the genetic information can pass on during reproduction.
Therefore, we included this variable as a factor (with studies where we extracted the information on mutation rate directly from the publication being scored as 0, and studies where we estimated mutation rate after exclusion of extra-pair parentage were scored as 1) in the analyses because we could not correct all mutation rate estimates due to missing values.
But is this relevant for computing complexity? in p. 5:\In fact, mutations are not normally allowed for a real protein sequence" - not true, viruses are notorious for rapid evolution that is facilitated, in the case of RNA viruses, by a particularly high mutation rate (but again, is this information even needed for what authors are proposing?).
Since microsatellite markers and the D-loop sequence of mitochondrial DNA have a high mutation rates, they provide information about recent evolutionary history as compared to slow mutating genes that provide data about ancient history [ 21].
First we will discuss the role of mutation rates on the information accumulation of individuals by focusing on basic genomic characteristics such as length and structure.
Additionally, the combination of SNP information along with microsatellite data, whose mutation rate is much faster, offers valuable insights into human population evolutionary and demographic histories.
