Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 5, 2026

A Practical Guide to Phylogenetics for Nonexperts
Published on: February 5, 2014
Fastphylo: fast tools for phylogenetics
Mehmood Alam Khan1, Isaac Elias, Erik Sjölund
1KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Science for Life Laboratory, School of Computer Science and Communication, Department of Computational Biology, Solna, Sweden. malagori@kth.se.
Background:
Distance methods are ubiquitous tools in phylogenetics. Their primary purpose may be to reconstruct evolutionary history, but they are also used as components in bioinformatic pipelines. However, poor computational efficiency has been a constraint on the applicability of distance methods on very large problem instances.
Results:
We present fastphylo, a software package containing implementations of efficient algorithms for two common problems in phylogenetics: estimating DNA/protein sequence distances and reconstructing a phylogeny from a distance matrix. We compare fastphylo with other neighbor joining based methods and report the results in terms of speed and memory efficiency.
Conclusions:
Fastphylo is a fast, memory efficient, and easy to use software suite. Due to its modular architecture, fastphylo is a flexible tool for many phylogenetic studies.
Related Concept Videos
Microbial Phylogeny
Gene Evolution - Fast or Slow?
In contrast, regions which code...
Gene Evolution - Fast or Slow?
Evolutionary Relationships through Genome Comparisons
Phylogeny
Phylogenetic Trees

