Rate variation among the sites of a molecular sequence is commonly found in applications of phylogenetic inference. Several approaches exist to account for this feature but they do not usually enable the investigator to pinpoint the sites that evolve under one or another rate of evolution in a...

Approaches based upon sequence weights, to construct a position weight matrix of nucleotides from aligned inputs, are popular but little effort has been expended to measure their quality.We derive optimal sequence weights that minimize the sum of the variances of the estimators of base frequency...

Maximum Likelihood (ML) is used as a standard method for estimating divergence times in phylogenetic trees. The method is consistent and hence the precision can be improved by analyzing longer sequences. In this paper we show that the precision can be improved also by including more taxa to the...