Title
FastMG: a simple, fast, and accurate maximum likelihood procedure to estimate amino acid replacement rate matrices from large data sets.
Abstract
Amino acid replacement rate matrices are a crucial component of many protein analysis systems such as sequence similarity search, sequence alignment, and phylogenetic inference. Ideally, the rate matrix reflects the mutational behavior of the actual data under study; however, estimating amino acid replacement rate matrices requires large protein alignments and is computationally expensive and complex. As a compromise, sub-optimal pre-calculated generic matrices are typically used for protein-based phylogeny. Sequence availability has now grown to a point where problem-specific rate matrices can often be calculated if the computational cost can be controlled.The most time consuming step in estimating rate matrices by maximum likelihood is building maximum likelihood phylogenetic trees from protein alignments. We propose a new procedure, called FastMG, to overcome this obstacle. The key innovation is the alignment-splitting algorithm that splits alignments with many sequences into non-overlapping sub-alignments prior to estimating amino acid replacement rates. Experiments with different large data sets showed that the FastMG procedure was an order of magnitude faster than without splitting. Importantly, there was no apparent loss in matrix quality if an appropriate splitting procedure is used.FastMG is a simple, fast and accurate procedure to estimate amino acid replacement rate matrices from large data sets. It enables researchers to study the evolutionary relationships for specific groups of proteins or taxa with optimized, data-specific amino acid replacement rate matrices. The programs, data sets, and the new mammalian mitochondrial protein rate matrix are available at http://fastmg.codeplex.com.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1186/1471-2105-15-341
BMC Bioinformatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
phylogenetic trees,microarrays,bioinformatics,algorithms
Sequence alignment,Data set,Phylogenetic tree,Phylogenetic inference,Biology,Matrix (mathematics),Amino acid replacement,Maximum likelihood,Bioinformatics,Nearest neighbor search
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
15
1
1471-2105
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.34
10
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Cuong Cao Dang161.41
Vinh Sy Le2419.52
Olivier Gascuel343376.01
Bart Hazes440.34
Si Quang Le5575.94