The New York Times has an article talking about constructing and especially visualizing the tree of life called “Crunching the Data for the Tree of Life“. Its interesting, especially since I think it touches on many issues concerning tree size that even phylogenetic biologists haven’t really considered. There are lots of talk of “big” trees,…
Tag: FastTree
FastTree 3: Timing some runs
I downloaded some datasets from the SILVA96 database. These are structurally aligned SSU rDNA sequences. I browsed through the taxonomic groups and chose annelids (N=1050) and nematodes (N=5048) as smallish tests. I downloaded these as fasta files. I started with the annelids file. The file contain a LOT of gaps, because it comes from an…
FastTree 2.5: Update
The prediction I made before about a long silence once this year’s students turned up was sadly accurate. Anyway, students dealt with, grant proposal submitted, lectures (mostly) given, bureaucracy reduced (a bit), time to get on with some phylogenetics. I was playing before with FastTree. Although it looks to have been quite well tested by…
FastTree 2: Timing runs
In order to to see how quickly FastTree runs for me I need some automated method of timing it. While some programs like phyML return a runtime at the end FastTree doesn’t seem to. So I searched the web and found bits of perl code to put a script timer together. I have uploaded the…
FastTree 1: Compiling and testing
This is how I downloaded, compiled and got FastTree working. Its a bit obvious in places but I think detailed instructions are a good thing to have out there and Google findable. I am using a multicore MacPro 2.8GHz with 4GB RAM and OSX 10.5.4 (I’m not sure the 8 cores make any difference whatsoever…
Actual Science…
So when I started writing this blog I thought I would use it to outline some of the things I was working on as I went along. Not real projects, which I will write up and publish, but side projects and how I got them to work (or otherwise). Unfortunately there hasn’t been much of that,…
EvoPhylo 