ModelTest-NG: A New and Scalable Tool for the Selection of DNA and Protein Evolutionary Models

Diego Darriba; David Posada; Alexey M Kozlov; Alexandros Stamatakis; Benoit Morel; Tomas Flouri

doi:10.1093/molbev/msz189

ModelTest-NG: A New and Scalable Tool for the Selection of DNA and Protein Evolutionary Models

Mol Biol Evol. 2020 Jan 1;37(1):291-294. doi: 10.1093/molbev/msz189.

Authors

Diego Darriba^{1

2}, David Posada^{3

4

5}, Alexey M Kozlov², Alexandros Stamatakis^{2

6}, Benoit Morel², Tomas Flouri⁷

Affiliations

¹ Computer Architecture Group, Centro de investigación CITIC, Universidade da Coruña, Elviña, A Coruña, Spain.
² Computational Molecular Evolution Group, Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, Heidelberg, Germany.
³ Department of Biochemistry, Genetics, and Immunology, University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain.
⁴ Biomedical Research Center (CINBIO), University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain.
⁵ Galicia Sur Health Research Institute, Vigo, Spain.
⁶ Institute of Theoretical Informatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany.
⁷ Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London, London, United Kingdom.

Abstract

ModelTest-NG is a reimplementation from scratch of jModelTest and ProtTest, two popular tools for selecting the best-fit nucleotide and amino acid substitution models, respectively. ModelTest-NG is one to two orders of magnitude faster than jModelTest and ProtTest but equally accurate and introduces several new features, such as ascertainment bias correction, mixture, and free-rate models, or the automatic processing of single partitions. ModelTest-NG is available under a GNU GPL3 license at https://github.com/ddarriba/modeltest , last accessed September 2, 2019.

Keywords: efficient algorithms; high-performance computing; phylogenetic inference; phylogenetic model selection.

Publication types

Evaluation Study

MeSH terms

Amino Acid Substitution*
Evolution, Molecular*
Genetic Techniques*
Models, Genetic*
Software