In a paper published in Nature, the researchers report how they rebuilt state-of-the-art phylogenetic tree models to make them faster, more efficient and scalable while maintaining the models' accuracy.
Because Delphy runs entirely within a web browser, anyone with a laptop can perform these analyses without specialized training, software or computing infrastructure.
The researchers demonstrated that Delphy could analyze 100,000 viral DNA sequences and create phylogenetic trees 100–1,000 times faster than existing methods, reducing a task that took months to one that takes hours.
To test Delphy's accuracy, the team reproduced analyses from recent outbreaks and epidemics, including Ebola, Zika, SARS-CoV-2, mpox and H5N1.
They report that analysis was two to three orders of magnitude faster, showing that Delphy could create a phylogenetic tree from a dataset of 100,000 virus DNA sequences within a day.
Delphy can also identify key viral lineages and mutations and the timing of their emergence with the same accuracy as other commonly used methods.
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