Treephyler: fast taxonomic profiling of metagenomes

SUMMARY Assessment of phylogenetic diversity is a key element to the analysis of microbial communities. Tools are needed to handle next-generation sequencing data and to cope with the computational complexity of large-scale studies. Here, we present Treephyler, a tool for fast taxonomic profiling of metagenomes. Treephyler was evaluated on real metagenome to assess its performance in comparison to previous approaches for taxonomic profiling. Results indicate that Treephyler is in terms of speed and accuracy prepared for next-generation sequencing techniques and large-scale analysis. AVAILABILITY Treephyler is implemented in Perl; it is portable to all platforms and applicable to both nucleotide and protein input data. Treephyler is freely available for download at http://www.gobics.de/fabian/treephyler.php.