BMC Bioinformatics BioMed Central Software Open Access AxPcoords & parallel AxParafit: statistical co-phylogenetic analyses on thousands of taxa Alexandros Stamatakis*1,2, Alexander F Auch3, Jan Meier-Kolthoff3 and Markus Göker4 Address: 1École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, School of Computer & Communication Sciences, Laboratory for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics STATION 14, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland, 2Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, 3Center for Bioinformatics (ZBIT), Sand 14, Tübingen, University of Tübingen, Germany and 4Organismic Botany/Mycology, Auf der Morgenstelle 1, Tübingen, University of Tübingen, Germany Email: Alexandros Stamatakis* -
[email protected]; Alexander F Auch -
[email protected]; Jan Meier- Kolthoff -
[email protected]; Markus Göker -
[email protected] * Corresponding author Published: 22 October 2007 Received: 26 June 2007 Accepted: 22 October 2007 BMC Bioinformatics 2007, 8:405 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-8-405 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/8/405 © 2007 Stamatakis et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Current tools for Co-phylogenetic analyses are not able to cope with the continuous accumulation of phylogenetic data. The sophisticated statistical test for host-parasite co-phylogenetic analyses implemented in Parafit does not allow it to handle large datasets in reasonable times. The Parafit and DistPCoA programs are the by far most compute-intensive components of the Parafit analysis pipeline.