TIGER
TIGER: Identifying rapidly-evolving characters in evolutionary data.
About TIGER
TIGER is open source software for identifying rapidly evolving sites (columns in an alignment, or characters in a morphological dataset). It can deal with many kinds of data (molecular, morphological etc.). Sites like these are important to identify as they are very often removed or reweighted in order to improve phylogenetic reconstruction. When a site is changing very quickly between taxa it might not hold much phylogenetic information and therefore might simply be a source of noise. Use of TIGER can (a) allow you to see the amount of rapid evolution and noise in your alignment and (b) provide a quick and easy way to remove as many of the “noisy” sites as possible.
You can download the UNIX/MACOSX version here:
You can download the Windows version here:
TIGER uses conflict between site patterns as a proxy for rapid evolution; that is, a site that does not conflict with other sites in the alignment is generally a very slowly evolving or constant site. A site with lots of conflict is considered rapidly evolving (Cummins & McInerney, Systematic Biology, 2011). TIGER rates the conflict and categorizes the sites based on the rates. In this software the categories are called bins and are user definable (see manual for further details). Bin1 will contain the constant sites and the bin with the highest number will contain the most rapidly evolving sites.
System Requirements
TIGER is implemented in Python, so it should run on most computer platforms.
For UNIX machines, a working version of Python 2.5 or 2.6 is required. On Windows machines, TIGER comes with everything it needs and requires no further installations.
Manual
The TIGER manual can be downloaded here.
Citation:
Cummins, C.A. and McInerney, J.O. (2011) A method for inferring the rate of evolution of homologous characters that can potentially improve phylogenetic inference, resolve deep divergence and correct systematic biases. Systematic Biology 60 (6) 833-844. doi: 10.1093/sysbio/syr064. [link] [pdf]
Who has been using TIGER?
Title: Phylogenetics and biogeography of the Balkan sand gobies’ (Teleostei: Gobiidae): vulnerable species in need of taxonomic revision
Author(s): Vanhove Maarten P. M.; Economou Alcibiades N.; Zogaris Stamatis; et al.
Source: BIOLOGICAL JOURNAL OF THE LINNEAN SOCIETY Volume: 105 Issue: 1 Pages: 73-91 DOI: 10.1111/j.1095-8312.2011.01781.x Published: JAN 2012
Other Phylogenetic Software:
You might also be interested in our program ModelGenerator which implements a variety of methods for selecting between alternative models of sequence evolution for amino acid and nucleotide data.
If you are interested in phylogenetic supertrees, you might wish to take a look at our program CLANN. It implements a variety of supertree methods.
Contact Details
For questions or to report a bug please contact carlacummins@gmail.com.
Share this site using the links below. You can subscribe to our blog posts here: 
PNAS (evolution)
- Enzyme functional evolution through improved catalysis of ancestrally nonpreferred substrates [Evolution]
- "Evolution Canyon," a potential microscale monitor of global warming across life [Evolution]
- Tight coevolution of proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA)-partner interaction networks in fungi leads to interspecies network incompatibility [Evolution]