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Distance Tree For Gerp

I would like to calculate GERP scores for few genomic regions from non-model organism A (mammal). Lets assume I will get genomes from 10 other species, be it closely related to A, good quality genomic sequence, etc.

Few questions:

  1. can I get some precalculated distance trees from some database?
  2. if not, what is the proper method to calculate distance tree for my set of species?
  3. assuming I got a tree with 20 species in it, but want to create genomic alignments for just 10+1 species, can I still use this tree or GERP will crash?

I will be also very thankful for any working GERP HowTos.

EDIT

Got one dictance tree here: http://genomewiki.ucsc.edu/index.php/Phylogenetic_Tree

conservation phylogeny

3 answers

Answering your 3rd point, GERP will ignore the species from the tree that are not in the alignment.

You can use www.timetree.org to estimate divergence distances between two species. Although not complete, it's one of the best resources out there:

http://www.timetree.org/index.php?taxon_a=Homo+sapiens&taxon_b=Macaca+mulatta

Apart from timetree, the NCBI taxonomy database also contains a phylogeny for most known species, but it doesn't have distance estimates, just a topology. Combining one and the other, you can get a tree of distances for your list of species.

Hey, I met many difficults in using gerp/gerp++, but succeed to solve them. I'm very excited and want to share your the solution.

You can find the solution and some examples (input, output) in here https://github.com/XDcat/GerpHelper.

Hey, thanks for that. When in Github you say:

Update 2022.10.28

I found the code from github can't run.

were you by any chance getting this error:

Segmentation fault

?

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