TAXON version 1.1: A simple way to generate uniform and fractionally weighted three-item matrices from various kinds of biological data

TL;DR

TAXON v1.1 is a user-friendly software tool that generates three-item statement matrices from various biological data types, supporting different weighting schemes to aid phylogenetic analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a simple method to create uniform and fractionally weighted three-item matrices from diverse biological data, filling a gap in existing tools.

Findings

Supports multiple data types including molecular sequences and multistate characters.

Allows fractional and uniform weighting of statements.

Provides an accessible platform for phylogenetic matrix generation.

Abstract

An open-access program allowing three-item statement matrices to be generated from data such as molecular sequences does not exist so far. The recently developed LisBeth package (ver. 1.0) allows representing hypotheses of homology among taxa or areas directly as rooted trees or as hierarchies; however, this is not a standard matrix-based platform. Here we present "TAXON version 1.1" (TAXON), a program designed for building three-item statement-matrices from binary, additive (ordered) and non-additive (unordered) multistate characters, with both fractional and uniform weighting of the resulted statements.