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How to determine sample clusters from phylogeny

Hi, I have constructed a phylogenetic tree (Roary, FastTree) of outbreak bacterial isolates (staph) and am wondering how I can determine which isolates form a cluster. Also, do you have any advice on how to be consistent with cluster definitions when more isolates are added to the analysis.

Thank you for your help!

cluster detection phylogeny

Do you want to see the clusters in hierarchical clustering?

Hi Ron, I'm a bit naive in the space of clustering algorithms, but, yes, hierarchical clustering looks good. I'm hoping the clustering algorithm can divide clades into clusters (and provide a statistic for where it calculates where a clade/cluster starts/ends). Do you have any recommendations for software that could determine the clusters? Thank you.

1 answer

Use ClusterPicker to define clusters based on branch support and pairwise distances of the sequences or if you are trying to delimit species use something like PTP/bPTP/GMYC.

Fantastic. Thank you Joseph. I tried it on my data (just the gui) but it doesn't look like it likes my dataset (112 samples at ~3MB each). I'll try via command line on the HPC to see if this works.

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