Gruenstaeudl Michael
Institut für Biologie-Botanik, Dahlem Centre of Plant Sciences, Freie Universität Berlin, Altensteinstraße 6, 14195 Berlin, Germany.
Appl Plant Sci. 2016 Feb 12;4(2). doi: 10.3732/apps.1500120. eCollection 2016 Feb.
Reconstructions of ancestral character states are among the most widely used analyses for evaluating the morphological, cytological, or ecological evolution of an organismic lineage. The software application Mesquite remains the most popular application for such reconstructions among plant scientists, even though its support for automating complex analyses is limited. A software tool is needed that automates the reconstruction and visualization of ancestral character states with Mesquite and similar applications.
A set of command line-based Python scripts was developed that (a) communicates standardized input to and output from the software applications Mesquite, BayesTraits, and TreeGraph2; (b) automates the process of ancestral character state reconstruction; and (c) facilitates the visualization of reconstruction results.
WARACS provides a simple tool that streamlines the reconstruction and visualization of ancestral character states over a wide array of parameters, including tree distribution, character state, and optimality criterion.
祖先性状状态的重建是评估生物谱系的形态、细胞学或生态进化时使用最广泛的分析方法之一。尽管软件应用程序Mesquite对复杂分析自动化的支持有限，但它仍是植物科学家进行此类重建最常用的应用程序。需要一种软件工具来实现使用Mesquite及类似应用程序对祖先性状状态进行自动化重建和可视化。
开发了一组基于命令行的Python脚本，这些脚本能够（a）将标准化输入传输到软件应用程序Mesquite、BayesTraits和TreeGraph2并输出；（b）自动执行祖先性状状态重建过程；（c）便于对重建结果进行可视化。
WARACS提供了一个简单的工具，可在广泛的参数范围内简化祖先性状状态的重建和可视化，这些参数包括树分布、性状状态和最优性标准。
