Ancestral sequence reconstruction using TreeTime

At the core of TreeTime is a class that models how sequences change along the tree. This class allows to reconstruct likely sequences of internal nodes of the tree. On the command-line, ancestral reconstruction can be done via the command

treetime ancestral --aln data/h3n2_na/h3n2_na_20.fasta --tree data/h3n2_na/h3n2_na_20.nwk --outdir ancestral_results

This command will save a number of files into the directory ancestral_results and generate the output

Inferred GTR model:
Substitution rate (mu): 1.0

Equilibrium frequencies (pi_i):
  A: 0.2983
  C: 0.1986
  G: 0.2353
  T: 0.2579
  -: 0.01

Symmetrized rates from j->i (W_ij):
  A C G T -
  A 0 0.8273  2.8038  0.4525  1.031
  C 0.8273  0 0.5688  2.8435  1.0561
  G 2.8038  0.5688  0 0.6088  1.0462
  T 0.4525  2.8435  0.6088  0 1.0418
  - 1.031 1.0561  1.0462  1.0418  0

Actual rates from j->i (Q_ij):
  A C G T -
  A 0 0.2468  0.8363  0.135 0.3075
  C 0.1643  0 0.1129  0.5646  0.2097
  G 0.6597  0.1338  0 0.1432  0.2462
  T 0.1167  0.7332  0.157 0 0.2686
  - 0.0103  0.0106  0.0105  0.0104  0

--- alignment including ancestral nodes saved as
   ancestral_results/ancestral_sequences.fasta

--- tree saved in nexus format as
   ancestral_results/annotated_tree.nexus

TreeTime has inferred a GTR model and used it to reconstruct the most likely ancestral sequences. The reconstructed sequences will be written to a file ending in _ancestral.fasta and a tree with mutations mapped to branches will be saved in nexus format in a file ending on _mutation.nexus. Mutations are added as comments to the nexus file like [&mutations="G27A,A58G,A745G,G787A,C1155T,G1247A,G1272A"].

Amino acid sequences

Ancestral reconstruction of amino acid sequences works analogously to nucleotide sequences. However, the user has to either explicitly choose an amino acid substitution model (JTT92)

treetime ancestral --tree data/h3n2_na/h3n2_na_20.nwk  --aln data/h3n2_na/h3n2_na_20_aa.fasta --gtr JTT92

or specify that this is a protein sequence alignment using the flag --aa:

treetime ancestral --tree data/h3n2_na/h3n2_na_20.nwk  --aln data/h3n2_na/h3n2_na_20_aa.fasta --aa

VCF files as input

In addition to standard fasta files, TreeTime can ingest sequence data in form of vcf files which is common for bacterial data sets where short reads are mapped against a reference and only variable sites are reported. In this case, an additional argument specifying the mapping reference is required.

treetime ancestral --aln data/tb/lee_2015.vcf.gz --vcf-reference data/tb/tb_ref.fasta --tree data/tb/lee_2015.nwk

The ancestral reconstruction is saved as a vcf files with the name ancestral_sequences.vcf.