Maximum Likelihood Analysis of Phylogenetic Data

phylogeny, the evolutionary tree or lines of descent of living species.

Maximum likelihood methods of statistical inference were first developed in the 1930's by R.A. Fisher. Theoretical application to phylogenetic analysis was developed by Felsenstein in the `70's and early `80's. Maximum likelihood methods of phylogenetic inference are superior to some other methods, particularly when the data set includes highly divergent sequences, which are desirable but increase the computational difficulty enormously. Parallel computing methods now make the analysis of such large data sets practical.

fastDNAml [Olsen et.al. 1994, based on Felsenstein 1981] computes the likelihood of various phylogenetic trees, starting with aligned DNA sequences from a number of species. More documentation is available.

We have modified and extended the serial version of fastDNAml to run in parallel on heterogenous and widely distributed systems. A combined PVM/MPI implementation of fastDNAml version 1.2.2 is now available for download, under the terms of the