MSTgold

Minimum spanning tree (MST) algorithms can generate multiple, equally-minimal, MSTs but MST programs typically report only one, arbitrarily chosen MST. Similarly, most MST programs do not provide statistical metrics to support the credibility of the MSTs that they estimate.

MSTgold estimates the number of alternative MSTs, reports up to a user-determined number of those trees, reports a consensus tree, and implements a bootstrapping metric to assess the reliability of alternate MST solutions.

MSTgold accepts single-character data that are nucleotides, amino acids, binary characters, or SNPs; integers that represent, for instance, the lengths of VNTRs or microsatellites; and distance matrices.

The MSTgold package includes Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows executables of the MSTgold program, a detailed Manual, example data and results, and executables of the program Fasta2MSTG which converts Fasta sequence files to the MSTgold input format.