MODELESTIMATOR: Estimating Amino Acid Replacement Rates

Description

This program estimates amino acid replacement rates from an input of aligned sequences. The method is described in a forthcoming paper.

Availability

modelestimator is distributed under the GNU General Public License, and is available for immediate download. This is version 1.1, which improves on version 1.0 by fixing a bug regarding scaling of the rate matrix and work on recent versions of Octave (cell arrays are used instead of deprecated lists.) The software is a Perl script that reads input, produces script files for, and pipes them to, Octave that does the actual computations. A fairly recent version of Octave is needed as the 'list' function must be supported.

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Please cite

• Lars Arvestad, Efficient methods for estimating amino acid replacement rates, 2006, J Mol Evol, 62(6):663–673.

if you use modelestimator!

Usage

Usage: modelestimator [<options>] <infile> [<outfile>]

The infile should be in either FASTA, STOCKHOLM, or PHYLIP format.
Output is a rate matrix and residue distribution vector, both in Octave/Matlab
format.

Options:
   -indels        Remove gap columns. A gap is denoted by '-'.

   -threshold <f> Stop when consecutive iterations do not change by more
                  than <f>. Default is 0.001.

   -paml          Output model for use with PAML.
   -fasta         Output substitution matrix (Pam250) for use with FastA.

   -v             Verbose. Show progress info on STDERR.
   -octave <path> Point to the Octave binary to run. 'octave' by default.
   -d             Debug option. Output Octave commands to STDOUT.

   -version       Show version information.
   -u, -h         This help text.

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