Introduction

BEAST is a bioinformatics program designed to construct and analyze phylogenetic trees using molecular sequence data. The program does this using a Bayesian Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach to construct trees from suchg datasets.

Using BEAST on RCC Resources

BEAST is available on the RCC Spear and HPC nodes. In order to run BEAST and its related programs including the GUI BEAUti, you will need to specify the entire path to the program. This path is /opt/hpc/gnu/beast/bin/[PROGRAMNAME] where [PROGRAMNAME] is the name of the executable you wish to run such as BEAUti or BEAST itself (beauti and beast are the program names respectively). For detailed usage documentation, refer to the BEAST homepage as it contains a wealth of tutorials and guides for using BEAST.

Example

    # Bring up the BEAUti GUI to import data and generate a BEAST file
    >> /opt/hpc/gnu/beast/bin/beauti
    # Run BEAST and choose options according to your job's needs.
    >> /opt/hpc/gnu/beast/bin/beast

Tutorials on running BEAST can be found here on the software's main website.