ESL-PSC Toolkit: a graphical software environment for linking shared genetic changes to convergent phenotypes

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Allard, John B., Kumar, Sudhir
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Allard, John B.
Kumar, Sudhir
author_facet Allard, John B.
Kumar, Sudhir
contents Convergent evolution provides a useful framework for testing whether independent origins of similar traits share common genetic mechanisms. Evolutionary Sparse Learning with Paired Species Contrast (ESL-PSC) is an approach to identify genes and sites associated with convergent traits from aligned sequences by fitting sparse predictive models to phylogenetically informed species contrasts. However, practical use of ESL-PSC currently requires substantial command-line fluency for data assembly, species-pair design, execution, and output interpretation. Here we present an integrated ESL-PSC analysis environment (ESL-PSC Toolkit) centered on a graphical user interface (GUI). ESL-PSC Toolkit is designed to assist users from experimental design through data interpretation without requiring extensive technical expertise. It supports guided input validation, interactive tree-based pair selection, command preview, live execution, post-run exploration of ranked genes and aligned sites, a complementary substitution-counting method, and analysis of continuous quantitative convergent traits. The computational backend has been reimplemented in Rust with many performance optimizations and parallelism, greatly reducing runtime for most analyses and enabling cross-platform packaged distributions. Downloadable GUI and CLI toolkit software packages for Mac, Windows, and Linux are available at https://github.com/John-Allard/ESL-PSC/releases/latest.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_27677
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ESL-PSC Toolkit: a graphical software environment for linking shared genetic changes to convergent phenotypes
Allard, John B.
Kumar, Sudhir
Populations and Evolution
Convergent evolution provides a useful framework for testing whether independent origins of similar traits share common genetic mechanisms. Evolutionary Sparse Learning with Paired Species Contrast (ESL-PSC) is an approach to identify genes and sites associated with convergent traits from aligned sequences by fitting sparse predictive models to phylogenetically informed species contrasts. However, practical use of ESL-PSC currently requires substantial command-line fluency for data assembly, species-pair design, execution, and output interpretation. Here we present an integrated ESL-PSC analysis environment (ESL-PSC Toolkit) centered on a graphical user interface (GUI). ESL-PSC Toolkit is designed to assist users from experimental design through data interpretation without requiring extensive technical expertise. It supports guided input validation, interactive tree-based pair selection, command preview, live execution, post-run exploration of ranked genes and aligned sites, a complementary substitution-counting method, and analysis of continuous quantitative convergent traits. The computational backend has been reimplemented in Rust with many performance optimizations and parallelism, greatly reducing runtime for most analyses and enabling cross-platform packaged distributions. Downloadable GUI and CLI toolkit software packages for Mac, Windows, and Linux are available at https://github.com/John-Allard/ESL-PSC/releases/latest.
title ESL-PSC Toolkit: a graphical software environment for linking shared genetic changes to convergent phenotypes
topic Populations and Evolution
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27677