Concatenator, a user-friendly program to concatenate DNA sequences, implementing graphical user interfaces for MAFFT and FastTree

Abstract

Motivation: Phylogenetic and phylogenomic analyses require multi-gene input files in different formats, but there are few user-friendly programs facilitating the workflow of combining, concatenating or separating, aligning and exploring multi-gene datasets. Results: We present Concatenator, a user-friendly GUI-driven program that accepts single-marker and multi-marker DNA sequences in different input formats, including Fasta, Phylip and Nexus, and that outputs concatenated sequences as single-marker or multi-marker Fasta, interleaved nexus or Phylip files, including command files for downstream model selection in IQ-TREE. It includes the option to (re)align markers with MAFFT and produces exploratory trees with FastTree. Although tailored for medium-sized phylogenetic projects, Concatenator is able to process phylogenomic datasets of up to 30 000 markers.