Treepuzzle

Maximum likelihood phylogeny reconstruction using quartets

TREE-PUZZLE is a computer program to reconstruct phylogenetic trees from molecular sequence data by maximum likelihood. It implements a fast tree search algorithm, quartet puzzling, that allows analysis of large data sets and automatically assigns estimations of support to each internal branch. TREE-PUZZLE also computes pairwise maximum likelihood distances as well as branch lengths for user specified trees. Branch lengths can be calculated under the clock-assumption. In addition, TREE-PUZZLE offers a novel method, likelihood mapping, to investigate the support of a hypothesized internal branch without computing an overall tree and to visualize the phylogenetic content of a sequence alignment. TREE-PUZZLE also conducts a number of statistical tests on the data set chi-square test for homogeneity of base composition, likelihood ratio clock test, Kishino-Hasegawa test. The models of substitution provided by TREE-PUZZLE are TN, HKY, F84, SH for nucleotides, Dayhoff, JTT, mtREV24, VT, WAG, BLOSUM 62 for amino acids, and F81 for two-state data. Rate heterogeneity is modeled by a discrete Gamma distribution and by allowing invariable sites. The corresponding parameters can be inferred from the data set.