Here, we present a major advance of the OrthoFinder method. This extends OrthoFinder’s high accuracy orthogroup inference to provide phylogenetic inference of orthologs, rooted gene trees, gene duplication events, the rooted species tree, and comparative genomics statistics. Each output is benchmarked on appropriate real or simulated datasets, and where comparable methods exist, OrthoFinder is equivalent to or outperforms these methods. Furthermore, OrthoFinder is the most accurate ortholog inference method on the Quest for Orthologs benchmark test. Finally, OrthoFinder’s comprehensive phylogenetic analysis is achieved with equivalent speed and scalability to the fastest, score-based heuristic methods. OrthoFinder is available at https://github.com/davidemms/OrthoFinder.

Identifying homology relationships between sequences is fundamental to biological research. Here we provide a novel orthogroup inference algorithm called OrthoFinder that solves a previously undetected gene length bias in orthogroup inference, resulting in significant improvements in accuracy. Using real benchmark datasets we demonstrate that OrthoFinder is more accurate than other orthogroup inference methods by between 8 % and 33 %. Furthermore, we demonstrate the utility of OrthoFinder by providing a complete classification of transcription factor gene families in plants revealing 6.9 million previously unobserved relationships.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13059-015-0721-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Here, we present a major advance of the OrthoFinder method. This extends OrthoFinder's high accuracy orthogroup inference to provide phylogenetic inference of orthologs, rooted genes trees, gene duplication events, the rooted species tree, and comparative genomic statistics. Each output is benchmarked on appropriate real or simulated datasets and, where comparable methods exist, OrthoFinder is equivalent to or outperforms these methods. Furthermore, OrthoFinder is the most accurate ortholog inference method on the Quest for Orthologs benchmark test. Finally, OrthoFinder's comprehensive phylogenetic analysis is achieved with equivalent speed and scalability to the fastest, score-based heuristic methods. OrthoFinder is available at https://github.com/davidemms/OrthoFinder.

13Species tree inference is fundamental to our understanding of the evolution of life on earth. However, 14 species tree inference from molecular sequence data is complicated by gene duplication events that 15 limit the availably of suitable data for phylogenetic reconstruction. Here we propose a novel method 16 for species tree inference called STAG that is specifically designed to leverage data from multi-copy 17 gene families. By application to 12 real species datasets sampled from across the eukaryotic domain 18 we demonstrate that species trees inferred from multi-copy gene families are comparable in 19 accuracy to species trees inferred from single-copy orthologues. We further show that the ability to 20 utilise data from multi-copy gene families increases the amount of data available for species tree 21 inference by an average of 8 fold. We reveal that on real species datasets STAG has higher accuracy 22 than other leading methods for species tree inference; including concatenated alignments of protein 23 sequences, ASTRAL & NJst. Finally we show that STAG is fast, memory efficient and scalable and 24 thus suitable for analysis of large multispecies datasets. 25

The correct interpretation of any phylogenetic tree is dependent on that tree being correctly rooted. We present STRIDE, a fast, effective, and outgroup-free method for identification of gene duplication events and species tree root inference in large-scale molecular phylogenetic analyses. STRIDE identifies sets of well-supported in-group gene duplication events from a set of unrooted gene trees, and analyses these events to infer a probability distribution over an unrooted species tree for the location of its root. We show that STRIDE correctly identifies the root of the species tree in multiple large-scale molecular phylogenetic data sets spanning a wide range of timescales and taxonomic groups. We demonstrate that the novel probability model implemented in STRIDE can accurately represent the ambiguity in species tree root assignment for data sets where information is limited. Furthermore, application of STRIDE to outgroup-free inference of the origin of the eukaryotic tree resulted in a root probability distribution that provides additional support for leading hypotheses for the origin of the eukaryotes.