Open AccessTreSpEx–-Detection of Misleading Signal in Phylogenetic Reconstructions Based on Tree Information
Author(s) -
Torsten H. Struck
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
evolutionary bioinformatics online
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.502
H-Index - 32
ISSN - 1176-9343
DOI - 10.4137/ebo.s14239
Subject(s) - perl , phylogenetic tree , tree (set theory) , computer science , pipeline (software) , process (computing) , source code , software , data mining , code (set theory) , biology , programming language , gene , mathematics , biochemistry , set (abstract data type) , mathematical analysis
Phylogenies of species or genes are commonplace nowadays in many areas of comparative biological studies. However, for phylogenetic reconstructions one must refer to artificial signals such as paralogy, long-branch attraction, saturation, or conflict between different datasets. These signals might eventually mislead the reconstruction even in phylogenomic studies employing hundreds of genes. Unfortunately, there has been no program allowing the detection of such effects in combination with an implementation into automatic process pipelines. TreSpEx (Tree Space Explorer) now combines different approaches (including statistical tests), which utilize tree-based information like nodal support or patristic distances (PDs) to identify misleading signals. The program enables the parallel analysis of hundreds of trees and/or predefined gene partitions, and being command-line driven, it can be integrated into automatic process pipelines. TreSpEx is implemented in Perl and supported on Linux, Mac OS X, and MS Windows. Source code, binaries, and additional material are freely available at http://www.annelida.de/research/bioinformatics/software.html.