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A fast likelihood method to reconstruct and visualize ancestral scenarios

The Institut Pasteur is at the forefront of computational biology research. Scientists in the Evolutionary Bioinformatics Unit recently developed the PastML program. This tool, based on decision-theory concepts, reconstructs "ancestral scenarios" that describe the evolution of traits or characters along phylogenetic trees. The characters can be very varied and represent the morphology of species studied, biochemical properties of proteins that evolved from a common ancestral protein, the geographical origin of an outbreak and its global spread, or the emergence and spread of resistance to treatments. In mere minutes, PastML analyzes vast reams of data and suggests the most likely hypotheses in a precise and robust manner. PastML is available to the international scientific community, just as Phylogeny.fr since 2008 and now NGPhylogeny.fr, a new version entirely rebuilt by the same teams in 2019.

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