About
Phylogenomic analyses for everyone, on any device.
SEGUL, short for SEquence and Genomic UtiLities, is a phylogenomic toolkit that scales from smartphones to high-performance computing clusters.
Why
Accessible, fast phylogenomics
Phylogenomic projects routinely involve thousands of loci and hundreds of samples. Preparing those datasets often requires a powerful computer, a stack of dependencies, and command-line experience. We build SEGUL to improve equity in evolutionary biology by removing those barriers.
SEGUL is a practical solution to typical phylogenomic data analyses, and a proof of concept for genomic software that runs anywhere, from a phone in the field to a cluster in the lab. It handles small Sanger datasets just as well.
How
One Rust core, three interfaces
The core library is written in Rust for speed, memory safety, and parallelism. The command line wraps the library directly, the SEGUI app is built with Flutter, and pysegul brings the same functions to Python.
Read the architecture guide, or the independent review by Chan (2024).
Cite
How to cite SEGUL
Handika, H., and J. A. Esselstyn. 2024. SEGUL: Ultrafast, memory-efficient and mobile-friendly software for manipulating and summarizing phylogenomic datasets. Molecular Ecology Resources, 24(7). https://doi.org/10.1111/1755-0998.13964
Can't access the article? Request a copy on ResearchGate.
Thanks
Acknowledgments
We thank Andre E. Moncrieff, Austin S. Chipps, Carl R. Hutter, Darwin Morales-Martínez, Diego J. Elias, Giovani Hernández-Canchola, Glaucia C. Del-Rio, Roberta C. Canton, Samantha L. Rutledge, Sarin Tiatragul, and Spenser J. Babb-Biernacki for their valuable feedback on the application and its documentation. We are grateful to Spenser J. Babb-Biernacki for suggesting the expansion of the SEGUL acronym.
Financial support was provided by the National Science Foundation (DEB-1754393 and DEB-2244754) and the Alfred L. Gardner and Mark S. Hafner Mammalogy Fund.
Several SEGUL features are inspired by Phyluce, AMAS, goalign, and FrogCap. SEGUL also benefits greatly from open-source libraries in the Rust and Flutter communities.