Malin: maximum likelihood analysis of intron evolution in eukaryotes.

Abstract

Malin is a software package for the analysis of eukaryotic gene structure evolution. It provides a graphical user interface for various tasks commonly used to infer the evolution of exon-intron structure in protein-coding orthologs. Implemented tasks include the identification of conserved homologous intron sites in protein alignments, as well as the estimation of ancestral intron content, lineage-specific intron losses and gains. Estimates are computed either with parsimony, or with a probabilistic model that incorporates rate variation across lineages and intron sites. Malin is available as a stand-alone Java application, as well as an application bundle for MacOS X, at the website http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~csuros/introns/malin/. The software is distributed under a BSD-style license.