title: MEGA6: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis version 6.0.
abstract: We announce the release of an advanced version of the Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis (MEGA) software, which currently contains facilities for building sequence alignments, inferring phylogenetic histories, and conducting molecular evolutionary analysis. In version 6.0, MEGA now enables the inference of timetrees, as it implements the RelTime method for estimating divergence times for all branching points in a phylogeny. A new Timetree Wizard in MEGA6 facilitates this timetree inference by providing a graphical user interface (GUI) to specify the phylogeny and calibration constraints step-by-step. This version also contains enhanced algorithms to search for the optimal trees under evolutionary criteria and implements a more advanced memory management that can double the size of sequence data sets to which MEGA can be applied. Both GUI and command-line versions of MEGA6 can be downloaded from www.megasoftware.net free of charge.
authors.affiliation: Research Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Hachioji, Tokyo, Japan.
authors.forename: Koichiro
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Tamura
authors.forename: Glen
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Stecher
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Peterson
authors.forename: Alan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Filipski
authors.forename: Sudhir
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kumar
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D020407:Internet; D010802:Phylogeny; D012984:Software; D014584:User-Computer Interface
keywords: phylogeny; relaxed clocks; software