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DACTAL

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Encyclopedia of Metagenomics

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Synonyms

Phylogeny = phylogenetic tree = tree; Multiple sequence alignment = MSA

Definition

DACTAL = “Divide-and-conquer trees (almost) without alignments.”

Introduction

DACTAL (divide-and-conquer trees (almost) without alignments) is a method for estimating very large phylogenetic trees which utilizes an iterative divide-and-conquer technique to “boost” the accuracy and speed of an existing phylogeny estimation method. DACTAL constructs trees without needing to compute or use a multiple sequence alignment on the full dataset. This contribution describes the method and demonstrates its performance on biological and simulated datasets.

Phylogeny estimation is a basic step in many bioinformatics analyses, and there are many methods for estimating phylogenies (Felsenstein 2003). Most frequently, phylogeny estimation for a given set of taxa is performed in a sequence of steps: (1) a gene is selected, (2) sequences for that gene in the taxa are obtained, (3) a multiple sequence alignment...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Tandy Warnow

Authors
  1. Tandy Warnow
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tandy Warnow .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), Rockville, Maryland, USA

    Karen E. Nelson

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© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Warnow, T. (2013). DACTAL. In: Nelson, K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Metagenomics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6418-1_715-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6418-1_715-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-6418-1

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