Center for Discovery Research

MrBayes 3.1.2 MrBayes is a program for the Bayesian estimation of phylogeny. Bayesian inference of phylogeny is based upon a quantity called the posterior probability distribution of trees, which is the probability of a tree conditioned on the observations. The conditioning is accomplished using Bayes's theorem. The posterior probability distribution of trees is impossible to calculate analytically; instead, MrBayes uses a simulation technique called Markov chain Monte Carlo (or MCMC) to approximate the posterior probabilities of trees.

MUMmer 3.2 MUMmer is a system for rapidly aligning entire genomes, whether in complete or draft form. For example, MUMmer 3.0 can find all 20-basepair or longer exact matches between a pair of 5-megabase genomes in 13.7 seconds, using 78 MB of memory, on a 2.4 GHz Linux desktop computer. MUMmer can also align incomplete genomes; it can easily handle the 100s or 1000s of contigs from a shotgun sequencing project, and will align them to another set of contigs or a genome using the NUCmer program included with the system. If the species are too divergent for a DNA sequence alignment to detect similarity, then the PROmer program can generate alignments based upon the six-frame translations of both input sequences.

R Project for Statistical Computing R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, ...) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity.

Blast and NetBlast The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) finds regions of local similarity between sequences. The program compares nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence databases and calculates the statistical significance of matches. BLAST can be used to infer functional and evolutionary relationships between sequences as well as help identify members of gene families.

WU-BLAST Washington University BLAST (WU BLAST) version 2.0 is a powerful software package for gene and protein identification, using sensitive, selective and rapid similarity searches of protein and nucleotide sequence databases. The feature list for WU BLAST 2.0 is long and continues to expand. A complete suite of search programs (blastp, blastn, blastx, tblastn and tblastx) is included in the package, along with database management and support programs that include nrdb, patdb, xdformat, xdget, seg, dust and xnu.