Proposal Summary
To develop an open standard and API for phylogenetic models and improve the speed and scalability of the IQ-TREE software for phylogenetic inference from ultra-large genomic data.
IQ-TREE
Recent advances in next-generation sequencing generate a large amount of genomic data. While this facilitates evolutionary biologists to resolve many deep phylogenetic questions in the Tree of Life, large datasets pose major computational challenges for most software. The open-source software IQ-TREE tackles this challenge. We aim to improve speed and at the same time also maintain accuracy and flexibility. Since the first publication in 2013, IQ-TREE has been actively maintained by an international team and become widely-used in the scientific community.