alignments of nucleotide or amino acid sequences. It provides a wide range of
options that were designed to facilitate standard phylogenetic analyses. The
main strengths of PhyML lies in the large number of substitution models coupled
to various options to search the space of phylogenetic tree topologies, going
from very fast and efficient methods to slower but generally more accurate
approaches. It also implements two methods to evaluate branch supports in a
sound statistical framework (the non-parametric bootstrap and the approximate
likelihood ratio test). PhyML was designed to process moderate to large data
sets. In theory, alignments with up to 4,000 sequences 2,000,000 character-long
can analyzed. In practice however, the amount of memory required to process a
data set is proportional of the product of the number of sequences by their
length. Hence, a large number of sequences can only be processed provided that
they are short. Also, PhyML can handle long sequences provided that they are
not numerous. With most standard personal computers, the "comfort zone" for
PhyML generally lies around 3 to 500 sequences less than 2,000 character long.
WWW: http://code.google.com/p/phyml/
PR: 136877
Submitted by: Ben Allen <ben@sysadminschronicles.com>
