The software MUSCLE (Edgar, 2004) must be installed and available on the system. The text in
muscle.exe
must contain the exact command to invoke muscle on the system.
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
.