Vestige: Maximum likelihood phylogenetic footprinting

Background: Phylogenetic footprinting is the identification of functional regions of DNA by their evolutionary conservation. This is achieved by comparing orthologous regions from multiple species and identifying the DNA regions that have diverged less than neutral DNA. Vestige is a phylogenetic footprinting package built on the PyEvolve toolkit that uses probabilistic molecular evolutionary modelling to represent aspects of sequence evolution, including the conventional divergence measure employed by other footprinting approaches. In addition to measuring the divergence, Vestige allows the expansion of the definition of a phylogenetic footprint to include variation in the distribution of any molecular evolutionary processes. This is achieved by displaying the distribution of model parameters that represent partitions of molecular evolutionary substitutions. Examination of the spatial incidence of these effects across regions of the genome can identify DNA segments that differ in the ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2005
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Matthew J. Wakefield, Peter Maxwell, Gavin A. Huttley
• Keywords: BMCBI 2005, Evolutionary, Phylogenetic Footprinting, Vestige