An efficient program for phylogenetic inference using simulated annealing

Inference of phylogenetic trees comprising thousands of organisms based on the maximum likelihood method is computationally expensive. A new program RAxML-SA (Randomized Axelerated Maximum Likelihood with Simulated-Annealing) is presented that combines simulated annealing and hill-climbing techniques to improve the quality of final trees. In addition, to the ability to perform backward steps and potentially escape local maxima provided by simulated-annealing, a large number of "good" alternative topologies is generated- which can be used to build a consensus tree on the fly. Though, slower than some of the fastest hill-climbing programs such as RAxML-III and PHYML, RAxML-SAfinds better trees for large real data alignments containing more than 250 sequences. Furthermore, the performance on 40 simulated500-taxon alignments is reasonable in comparison to PHYML. Finally, a straight-forward and efficient OpenMP parallelization of RAxML is presented.