AncestralClust

AncestralClust is a tool to cluster divergent sequences. A neighbor-joining phylogenetic tree is built from a random number of user-specified initial sequences, the tree is split into initial clusters based on the longest branch lengths, each initial cluster is aligned with a multiple sequence alignment and the ancestral sequence from each cluster is inferred by the root node after being midpoint rooted. The rest of the sequences are assigned to the clusters based on their closest genetic distance to the ancestral sequence (or saved for a future iteration if the distance is greater than the average distance between clusters). The process reiterates until all sequences are assigned to a cluster.