title: L.U.St: a tool for approximated maximum likelihood supertree reconstruction.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Supertrees combine disparate, partially overlapping trees to generate a synthesis that provides a high level perspective that cannot be attained from the inspection of individual phylogenies. Supertrees can be seen as meta-analytical tools that can be used to make inferences based on results of previous scientific studies. Their meta-analytical application has increased in popularity since it was realised that the power of statistical tests for the study of evolutionary trends critically depends on the use of taxon-dense phylogenies. Further to that, supertrees have found applications in phylogenomics where they are used to combine gene trees and recover species phylogenies based on genome-scale data sets.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Here, we present the L.U.St package, a python tool for approximate maximum likelihood supertree inference and illustrate its application using a genomic data set for the placental mammals. L.U.St allows the calculation of the approximate likelihood of a supertree, given a set of input trees, performs heuristic searches to look for the supertree of highest likelihood, and performs statistical tests of two or more supertrees. To this end, L.U.St implements a winning sites test allowing ranking of a collection of a-priori selected hypotheses, given as a collection of input supertree topologies. It also outputs a file of input-tree-wise likelihood scores that can be used as input to CONSEL for calculation of standard tests of two trees (e.g. Kishino-Hasegawa, Shimidoara-Hasegawa and Approximately Unbiased tests).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This is the first fully parametric implementation of a supertree method, it has clearly understood properties, and provides several advantages over currently available supertree approaches. It is easy to implement and works on any platform that has python installed.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  bitBucket page - https://afro-juju@bitbucket.org/afro-juju/l.u.st.git.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  Davide.Pisani@bristol.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Wasiu A
authors.initials: WA
authors.lastname: Akanni
authors.forename: Christopher J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Creevey
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Wilkinson
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, The National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland. davide.pisani@bristol.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Davide
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Pisani
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D023281:Genomics; D006801:Humans; D016013:Likelihood Functions