Kamino: fast proteome-wide variant calling for amino acid phylogenomics.

Kamino rapidly generates accurate proteome-wide amino acid phylogenomic alignments, outperforming classical methods with speeds several orders of magnitude faster.

• Why it matters: Efficient and scalable phylogenetic analysis is essential for understanding evolutionary relationships across diverse organisms, but current approaches are computationally intensive and limited in scope.
• What they did: The authors developed kamino, a reference- and alignment-free method that uses shared flanking sequences and local k-mer occupancy changes to produce phylogenetically informative alignments from proteomes of prokaryotes and eukaryotes, tested on multiple datasets.
• The result: Kamino accurately recovers known phylogenies, such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis lineages and Drosophila relationships, enabling fast, broad-scale evolutionary studies with moderate memory use.