CompactTree: A lightweight header-only C++ library for ultra-large phylogenetics

Motivation The study of viral and bacterial species requires the ability to load and traverse ultra-large phylogenies with tens of millions of tips, but existing tree libraries struggle to scale to these sizes. Results We introduce CompactTree, a lightweight header-only C++ library for traversing ultra-large trees that can be easily incorporated into other tools, and we show that it is orders of magnitude faster and requires orders of magnitude less memory than existing tree packages. Availability CompactTree can be accessed at: https://github.com/niemasd/CompactTree Contact niema@ucsd.edu Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.