TREECON: A software package for the construction and drawing of evolutionary trees

Abstract

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 bootstrap analysis on nucleic acid sequences. TREE implements different evolutionary 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 evolutionary tree, changes its size or topology, and produces drawings suitable for publication. Whereas MATRIX is suited only for nucleic acids, the modules TREE, ROOT and DRAW are applicable to any kind of dissimilarity matrix. The programs run on IBM-compatible microcomputers using the DOS operating system.