QDist

The QDist package implements the O(n log² n) time method for computing the quartet distance between unrooted evolutionary trees. The method is described in the paper: Computing the Quartet Distance Between Evolutionary Trees in Time O(n log² n), G. Brodal, R. Fagerberg, and C.N.S. Pedersen, in Proceedings of the 12th International Symposium for Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC), 2001.

QDist is described in more detail in:

• QDist—Quartet Distance Between Evolutionary Trees, T. Mailund and C.N.S. Pedersen, Bioinformatics, Vol. 20, No. 10, pp 1636-1637, 2004.

Usage

The QDist program takes as input a set of trees in newick format over the same set of species and computes the quartet distance between them. Run qdist --help for more info.

Installation

From Source

The QDist package is written in C++. It should compile on any Unix like system. To install the QDist package download the source code and unpack it (tar xzf qdist-a.b.c.tar.gz, where a.b.c is the version number of qdist), then run configure and make in the subdirectory qdist-a.b.c created during unpacking. Read the INSTALL file for more info.

From Binary

Currently, the only binary distribution is in RPM packages. Other formats might appear, if I am asked to build them (and told how to...). To install, download the file and run rpm -U qdist-version.arch.rpm.

Contact

Thomas Mailund, <mailund@birc.au.dk>, Bioinformatics Research Center, University of Aarhus.