SlimCodeML: An Optimized Version of CodeML for the Branch-Site Model

CodeML (part of the PAML package) implements a maximum likelihood-based approach to detect positive selection on a specific branch of a given phylogenetic tree. While CodeML is widely used, it is very compute-intensive. We present SlimCodeML, an optimized version of CodeML for the branch-site model. Our performance analysis shows that SlimCodeML substantially outperforms CodeML (up to 9.38 times faster), especially for large-scale genomic analyses.