Root Digger: a root placement program for phylogenetic trees

BACKGROUND: In phylogenetic analysis, it is common to infer unrooted trees. However, knowing the root location is desirable for downstream analyses and interpretation. There exist several methods to recover a root, such as molecular clock analysis (including midpoint rooting) or rooting the tree using an outgroup. Non-reversible Markov models can also be used to compute the likelihood of a potential root position. RESULTS: We present a software called RootDigger which uses a non-reversible Markov model to compute the most likely root location on a given tree and to infer a confidence value for each possible root placement. We find that RootDigger is successful at finding roots when compared to similar tools such as IQ-TREE and MAD, and will occasionally outperform them. Additionally, we find that the exhaustive mode of RootDigger is useful in quantifying and explaining uncertainty in rooting positions. CONCLUSIONS: RootDigger can be used on an existing phylogeny to find a root, or to asses the uncertainty of the root placement. RootDigger is available under the MIT licence at https://www.github.com/computations/root_digger.