TREECON - A SOFTWARE PACKAGE FOR THE CONSTRUCTION AND DRAWING OF EVOLUTIONARY TREES

A package of programs (run by a management program called TREECON) was developed for the construction and drawing of evolutionary trees. The program MATRIX calculates dissimilarity values and can perform bootst rap analysis on nucleic acid sequences. TREE implements different evol utionary tree constructing methods based on distance matrices. Because some of these methods produce unrooted evolutionary trees, a program ROOT places a root on the tree. Finally, the program DRAW draws the ev olutionary tree, changes its size or topology, and produces drawings s uitable for publication. Whereas MATRIX is suited only for nucleic aci ds, the modules TREE, ROOT and DRAW are applicable to any kind of diss imilarity matrix. The programs run on IBM-compatible microcomputers us ing the DOS operating system.