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Updated: Aug 20, 2026

A Practical Guide to Phylogenetics for Nonexperts
Published on: February 5, 2014
Phylomat: an automated protein motif analysis tool for phylogenomics
W Vallen Graham1, David K Tcheng, Andrew L Shirk
1University of Illinois, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
Abstract:
Recent progress in genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics enables unprecedented opportunities to examine the evolutionary history of molecular, cellular, and developmental pathways through phylogenomics. Accordingly, we have developed a motif analysis tool for phylogenomics (Phylomat, http://alg.ncsa.uiuc.edu/pmat) that scans predicted proteome sets for proteins containing highly conserved amino acid motifs or domains for in silico analysis of the evolutionary history of these motifs/domains. Phylomat enables the user to download results as full protein or extracted motif/domain sequences from each protein. Tables containing the percent distribution of a motif/domain in organisms normalized to proteome size are displayed. Phylomat can also align the set of full protein or extracted motif/domain sequences and predict a neighbor-joining tree from relative sequence similarity. Together, Phylomat serves as a user-friendly data-mining tool for the phylogenomic analysis of conserved sequence motifs/domains in annotated proteomes from the three domains of life.
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