Abstract (eng)
TreeShredder is a parallelized multi-tool software for the phylogenetic analysis of large sets of trees based on their splits. TreeShredder can deal with datasets of millions of trees with thousands of taxa. It offers well-established analysis approaches and extends them by additional, more recently introduced features. Many time-consuming procedures, such as parsing huge numbers of Newick tree strings, or calculating Transfer Bootstrap Expectation values, are parallelized. A space and time-saving file format for split and tree information storage and retrieval, the TreeShredder file, is introduced and its advantages are demonstrated. TreeShredder implements a matrix representation feature for supertree construction, which has seen discontinued maintenance and support of capable software in recent years. TreeShredder offers comprehensive reference tree and consensus tree features, including the newly introduced global relative majority consensus tree. Additionally, the user can map eight different split measures, including occurrence rates, Internode Certainty, or Transfer Bootstrap Expectation, but also newly developed measures such as a split’s best incompatible split’s support and the difference in their support, onto the reference and consensus trees. Unique among competitor software in the field, TreeShredder can find based on a set of splits or even incomplete spits congruent trees, determine the congruency status with the splits in the trees, and calculate congruency measures. Besides the well-established Robinson-Foulds distances, which show similarity between tree topologies, a new measure, called Split Co-Occurrence is introduced, which shows how often two splits co-occur in the same tree. Space-saving output compression comes without runtime increase. TreeShredder’s performance compares favourably against similar features offered in software such as RAxML and BOOSTER, especially, but not exclusively, if the phylogenetic analysis is started from TreeShredder files. By means of diverse datasets of trees ranging in size from tens to thousands of taxa, I show that TreeShredder is a valuable and versatile addition to the phylogenetic analysis toolbox.