Beluga.jl

Beluga is a julia library for the statistical analysis of gene family evolution using phylogenetic birth-death processes. It's somewhat related to Whale.jl as it implements models of duplication loss and whole-genome duplication, but employs gene count data instead of gene trees. The library implements the MCMC sampler of Zwaenepoel & Van de Peer (2019) as well as the reversible-jump MCMC sampler of Zwaenepoel & Van de Peer (2020, in preparation).

Data preparation

To perform analyses with Beluga, you will need

  1. A species tree with branch lengths (preferbly an ultrametric time tree)
  2. A phylogenetic profile matrix. If you have a bunch of protein fasta files for a set of species of interest, this can be easily obtained using e.g. OrthoFinder.
Note

If you only need the phylogenetic profile matrix from OrthoFinder, be sure to use the -og flag to stop the OrthoFinder pipeline after orthogroup inference. The phylogenetic profile matrix can be found in the Orthogroups.GeneCount.tsv file.