About the Number of Base Substitutions Between Humans and Common Chimpanzees

Humans and chimpanzees are believed to have shared a common ancestor about 6 million years ago. Here using a new distance measure called the Jump distance, we calculate the number of base substitutions that might have occurred in the mitochondrial DNA during these 6 million years. Because of the rapid rate of changes, Mitochondrial DNA has got its own place in phylogenetic analysis. In the literature, different substitution rates for mitochondrial bases ranging roughly 0.025-0.26/Site/Myr (Parsons et. al. [1]), are taken for phylogenetic study. On the basis of different studies, it is believed that humans and chimpanzees were diverged from some common ancestor about 6 million years ago. Here we conduct a distance-based analysis to find the approximate number of mitochondrial base substitutions that might have occurred between these two species during a period of 6 million years. For this we assume an average base change rate of 0.15/Site/Myr.