BackgroundReconciliation methods compare gene trees and species trees to recover evolutionary events such as duplications, transfers and losses explaining the history and composition of genomes. It is well-known that gene trees inferred from molecular sequences can be partly erroneous due to incorrect sequence alignments as well as phylogenetic reconstruction artifacts such as long branch attraction. In practice, this leads reconciliation methods to overestimate the number of evolutionary events. Several methods have been proposed to circumvent this problem, by collapsing the unsupported edges and then resolving the obtained multifurcating nodes, or by directly rearranging the binary gene trees. Yet these methods have been defined for models of evolution accounting only for duplications and losses, i.e. can not be applied to handle prokaryotic gene families.ResultsWe propose a reconciliation method accounting for gene duplications, losses and horizontal transfers, that specifically takes into account the uncertainties in gene trees by rearranging their weakly supported edges. Rearrangements are performed on edges having a low confidence value, and are accepted whenever they improve the reconciliation cost. We prove useful properties on the dynamic programming matrix used to compute reconciliations, which allows to speed-up the tree space exploration when rearrangements are generated by Nearest Neighbor Interchanges (NNI) edit operations. Experiments on synthetic data show that gene trees modified by such NNI rearrangements are closer to the correct simulated trees and lead to better event predictions on average. Experiments on real data demonstrate that the proposed method leads to a decrease in the reconciliation cost and the number of inferred events. Finally on a dataset of 30 k gene families, this reconciliation method shows a ranking of prokaryotic phyla by transfer rates identical to that proposed by a different approach dedicated to transfer detection [BMCBIOINF 11:324, 2010, PNAS 109(13):4962–4967, 2012].ConclusionsProkaryotic gene trees can now be reconciled with their species phylogeny while accounting for the uncertainty of the gene tree. More accurate and more precise reconciliations are obtained with respect to previous parsimony algorithms not accounting for such uncertainties [LNCS 6398:93–108, 2010, BIOINF 28(12): i283–i291, 2012].A software implementing the method is freely available at http://www.atgc-montpellier.fr/Mowgli/.

MotivationA reconciliation is an annotation of the nodes of a gene tree with evolutionary events—for example, speciation, gene duplication, transfer, loss, etc.—along with a mapping onto a species tree. Many algorithms and software produce or use reconciliations but often using different reconciliation formats, regarding the type of events considered or whether the species tree is dated or not. This complicates the comparison and communication between different programs.ResultsHere, we gather a consortium of software developers in gene tree species tree reconciliation to propose and endorse a format that aims to promote an integrative—albeit flexible—specification of phylogenetic reconciliations. This format, named recPhyloXML, is accompanied by several tools such as a reconciled tree visualizer and conversion utilities.Availability and implementation http://phylariane.univ-lyon1.fr/recphyloxml/.

Abstract. We propose a reconciliation heuristic accounting for gene duplications, losses and horizontal transfers that specifically takes into account the uncertainties in the gene tree. Rearrangements are tried for gene tree edges that are weakly supported, and are accepted whenever they improve the reconciliation cost. We prove useful properties on the dynamic programming matrix used to compute reconciliations, which allows to speed-up the tree space exploration when rearrangements are generated by Nearest Neighbor Interchanges (NNI) edit operations. Experimental results on simulated and real data confirm that running times are greatly reduced when considering the above-mentioned optimization in comparison to the naïve rearrangement procedure. Results also show that gene trees modified by such NNI rearrangements are closer to the correct (simulated) trees and lead to more correct event predictions on average. The program is available at http://www.atgc-montpellier.fr/Mowgli/

BackgroundCollaborative tools are of great help in conducting projects involving distant workers. Recent web technologies have helped to build such tools for jointly editing office documents and scientific data, yet none are available for handling phylogenies. Though a large number of studies and projects in evolutionary biology and systematics involve collaborations between scientists of different institutes, current tree comparison visualization software and websites are directed toward single-user access. Moreover, tree comparison functionalities are dispersed between different software that mainly focus on high level single tree visualization but to the detriment of basic tree comparison features.ResultsThe web platform presented here, named CompPhy, intends to fill this gap by allowing collaborative work on phylogenies and by gathering simple advanced tools dedicated to tree comparison. It offers functionalities for tree edition, tree comparison, supertree inference and data management in a collaborative environment. The latter aspect is a specific feature of the platform, allowing people located in different places to work together at the same time on a common project. CompPhy thus proposes shared tree visualization, both synchronous and asynchronous tree manipulation, data exchange/storage, as well as facilities to keep track of the progress of analyses in working sessions. Specific advanced comparison tools are also available, such as consensus and supertree inference, or automated branch swaps of compared trees. As projects can be readily created and shared, CompPhy is also a tool that can be used easily to interact with students in a educational setting, either in the classroom or for assignments.ConclusionsCompPhy is the first web platform devoted to the comparison of phylogenetic trees allowing real-time distant collaboration on a phylogenetic/phylogenomic project. This application can be accessed freely with a recent browser at the following page of the ATGC bioinformatics platform: http://www.atgc-montpellier.fr/compphy/.

Summary: WAVES is a web application dedicated to bioinformatic tool integration. It provides an efficient way to implement a service for any bioinformatic software. Such services are automatically made available in three ways: web pages, web forms to include in remote websites, and a RESTful web services API to access remotely from applications. In order to fulfill the service's computational needs, WAVES can perform computation on various resources and environments, such as Galaxy instances.

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.