On the Use of Mahalanobis’ Generalized Distance D²: Proposed Measures to Avoid its Misleading Applications: A Correction

Mahalanobis’ D² technique was suggested to be used to measure the genetic divergence between genotypes with respect to several characters at a time. However, use of this technique is important only in cases where the characters are correlated and/or are measured in different units of measurement. It was demonstrated that this technique is unnecessarily used when the characters are uncorrelated and are either measured in the same unit of measurement or are independent of the unit of measurement. In such divergence among different genotypes can be more conveniently measured as a simple sum of squared differences of the original mean values of corresponding characters. Four examples from literature are cited for illustration. Limitation of application of estimates of genetic diversity based on distance matrix in molecular phylogenetic studies have also been discussed.