Please cite: 
EPIK is a program for rapid alignment-free phylogenetic placement, the successor of RAPPAS.
It is advised to install the package in a new environment, because our C++ dependencies are strict and may clash with other packages (requiring libboost in particular).
We also recommend to use mamba, which is faster in solving environment dependencies.
conda create -n epik
conda activate epik
conda config --set channel_priority strict
# If you use mamba:
# conda config set channel_priority strict
# note that we install both ipk (database creation) and epik (phylogenetic placement)
mamba install ipk epik
If you find conda slow and clumsy, consider the wonderful pixi manager:
pixi init -c conda-forge -c bioconda
pixi add epik ipk
pixi shell
And you're good to go.
If you want to get your hands dirty, follow these steps.
- Boost Libraries >=1.6
- CMake >= 3.10
- GCC compiler must support c++17
- zlib
- rapidjson
- click
On Debian-like systems they can be installed with:
sudo apt install build-essential cmake libboost-dev libboost-serialization-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-iostreams-dev libboost-program-options-dev zlib1g-dev rapidjson-dev libquadmath0 python3-pip
pip3 install click
Once you installed EPIK and activated your virtual environment with conda activate epik or pixi shell, run:
# get some test alignment and tree
wget https://github.com/phylo42/IPK/raw/refs/heads/main/tests/data/D652/reference.fasta
wget https://github.com/phylo42/IPK/raw/refs/heads/main/tests/data/D652/tree.rooted.newick
# build database with IPK : using 1 CPU and default phylogenetic model parameters
# a better approach would be to use appropriate parameters, see documentation
ipk.py build --refalign reference.fasta --reftree tree.rooted.newick --states nucl --workdir . --model GTR
# place with EPIK
epik.py place -i DB.ipk -s nucl -o . reference.fasta
# jplace results
cat placements_reference.fasta.jplace
# you can do post-analyses with the excellent 'gappa' package
# (available in bioconda too, see https://github.com/lczech/gappa)
git clone --recursive https://github.com/phylo42/EPIK epik
cd epik && mkdir -p bin && cd bin
cmake ..
make -j4
You can use epik.py from the directory where it was built or install it system-wide or for a single user to make epik.py visible from any directory.
For a system-wide installation (requires elevated permissions):
sudo cmake --install .
Alternatively, to install for the current user, choose a directory where you want to install the tool. For instance, you might choose /home/$USER/opt or any other directory that you prefer. Replace DIRECTORY in the commands below with your chosen directory path:
cmake --install . --prefix DIRECTORY
export PATH=DIRECTORY/bin:$PATH
Remember to export the DIRECTORY/bin to your PATH. You can do this manually each time or add the export command to your shell initialization scripts (e.g., .bashrc).
To place queries to a phylogenetic tree, you need to first preprocess it with IPK and make a phylo-k-mer database (see here for detail). Queries should be in non-compressed fasta format. An example of placement command (see below for possible parameters values):
epik.py place -i DATABASE -s [nucl|amino] -o OUTPUT_DIR INPUT_FASTA
If EPIK is not installed, run ./epik.py from the EPIK directory instead.
| Option | Meaning | Default |
|---|---|---|
| -i | The path to the phylo-k-mer database to use for placement. | |
| -s | States, nucl for DNA and amino for proteins |
nucl |
| --omega | The user-defined threshold. Can be set higher than the one used when database was created. (If you are not sure, ignore this parameter.) | 1.5 |
| --mu | The proportion of the database to keep when filtering. Mutually exclusive with --max-ram. Should be a value in (0.0, 1.0] |
1.0 |
| --max-ram | The maximum amount of memory used to keep the database content. Mutually exclusive with --mu. Sets an approximate limit to EPIK's RAM consumption (i.e. the given limit might be exceeded but EPIK will consider it). Examples: 512, 256K, 42M, 4.2G. |
|
| --threads | Number of parallel threads used for placement. EPIK should be compiled with OpenMP support enabled, i.e. EPIK_OMP=ON. (If you compile as we recommend, it is enabled) |
1 |
Also, see epik.py place --help for information.
Code quality evaluation with softwipe [2]:
softwipe --cmake --cpp -x third-party,i2l/third-party,i2l/tests/catch2,i2l/examples --no-execution .
[1] Romashchenko, N., Linard, B., Pardi, F., & Rivals, E. (2023). EPIK: precise and scalable evolutionary placement with informative k-mers. Bioinformatics, 39(12), btad692. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btad692
[2] Zapletal, A., Höhler, D., Sinz, C., & Stamatakis, A. (2021). The SoftWipe tool and benchmark for assessing coding standards adherence of scientific software. Scientific reports, 11(1), 10015. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-89495-8