IQ-TREE for ultra-large genomic data

IQ-TREE is one of the most important and widely-used pieces of open-source software in the biomedical sciences. IQ-TREE turns DNA sequence data into robust inferences on relatedness. Since publication of the initial tool in 2013 (1) the software has been downloaded 80,000 times (GitHub and Bioconda) and the key publications describing the software (1-6) have gained a total of 4,300 Google Scholar citations. The usage of IQ-TREE is increasing exponentially (Figure 1). For example, the six key papers that describe the software were cited 172% more frequently in 2018 than in 2017. IQ-TREE is one of just two widely-used pieces of open-source Maximum-Likelihood phylogenetics software and was recently rated by an independent benchmark as the most accurate (7).