The software MUSCLE (Edgar, 2004) must be installed and available on the system. Test this by typing
system("muscle")
in the Console, and some sensible output should be produced. NOTE: The executable must
be named muscle
on your system, no version numbers etc. For more details
on MUSCLE, see http://www.drive5.com/muscle.
By default diags=FALSE
but can be set to TRUE
to increase speed. This should be done only
if sequences are highly similar.
By default maxiters=16
. If you have a large number of sequences (a few thousand), or they are
very long, then this may be too slow for practical use. A good compromise between speed and accuracy is to run
just the first two iterations of the algorithm. On average, this gives accuracy equal to T-Coffee
and speeds much faster than CLUSTALW. This is done by the option maxiters=2
.