Why IQ-TREE?

Thanks to the recent advent of next-generation sequencing techniques, the amount of phylogenomic/transcriptomic data have been rapidly accumulated. This extremely facilitates resolving many "deep phylogenetic" questions in the tree of life. At the same time it poses major computational challenges to analyze such big data, where most phylogenetic software cannot handle. Moreover, there is a need to develop more complex probabilistic models to adequately capture realistic aspects of genomic sequence evolution.

This trends motivated us to develop the IQ-TREE software with a strong emphasis on phylogenomic inference. Our goals are:

• Accuracy: Proposing novel computational methods that perform better than existing approaches.
• Speed: Allowing fast analysis on big data sets and utilizing high performance computing platforms.
• Flexibility: Facilitating the inclusion of new (phylogenomic) models and sequence data types.
• Versatility: Implementing a broad range of commonly-used maximum likelihood analyses.

IQ-TREE has been developed since 2011 as open-source software under the GNU-GPL license. It is actively maintained by the core development team (see below) and a number of collabrators (see right).

The name IQ-TREE comes from the fact that it is the successor of IQPNNI and TREE-PUZZLE software.

Contact

If you have further questions, feedback, feature requests and bug reports, please sign up (if not done yet) and post a topic to IQ-TREE Google group.

The average response time is two working days.

Credits

Some parts of the code were taken from the following packages/libraries: Phylogenetic likelihood library, TREE-PUZZLE, BIONJ, Nexus Class Libary, Eigen library, SPRNG library, Zlib library, gzstream library, vectorclass library, GNU scientific library.

Fundings

Generous fundings for the IQ-TREE project are provided by the Austrian Science Fund - FWF (grants I 760-B17 from 2012-2015 and I 2508-B29 from 2016-2019), University of Vienna (Initiativkolleg I059-N from 2011-2014), Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP200103151), and Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (EOSS-0000000132).