phylokit-mcp

Phylogenetic inference over MCP, driving IQ-TREE 2 through piqtree.

A topology without support is not a result. infer_tree always runs a bootstrap and always returns per-clade support. There is no flag to skip it.

5 tools, 62 tests against real IQ-TREE (no mocked engine), 10 mutation checks, and a real-process JSON-RPC handshake test.

Why the rule

A maximum-likelihood tree looks identical whether or not the data support it. Measured here, on alignments simulated from a known 7-taxon tree so the right answer is not in doubt:

sites	informative sites	recovered the true tree?	lowest clade support
300	51	yes, exactly	1.00
60	11	no — RF 2	0.57

At 60 sites the tree contains a clade (C,D,G) that does not exist and omits one that does (E,F,G). Both runs return a fully resolved Newick string of the same shape; nothing about the topology itself distinguishes them. The support values do — and the false clade is the lowest-supported one in the tree.

That is the entire argument for this server. Returning a bare tree returns a result the caller cannot evaluate.

What it reports that a Newick string cannot

• Conflicting clades — groupings the data support at ≥0.70 that are absent from the reported tree. A support-annotated Newick string has nowhere to attach these, so the standard format silently drops them.
• fraction_resolved — the share of clades clearing 0.70. The headline number, before any individual grouping is repeated as fact.
• Model runners-up with ΔAIC — not just a winner. On the 300-site alignment above, simulated under JC, the AIC winner is F81, with several models inside the conventional ±2 indistinguishability margin. A winner without its margin is a claim the numbers do not support.
• Length versus evidence — n_parsimony_informative alongside n_sites. A 10,000-site alignment of near-identical sequences supports nothing.

Tools

tool	what it does
infer_tree	ML tree plus bootstrap support, per clade. Never one without the other.
select_substitution_model	Ranks 100+ models with ΔAIC/AICc/BIC, and says when the criteria disagree.
compare_trees	Robinson–Foulds distance and the clades that differ. Compares splits, not strings.
simulate_alignment	Generates sequences along a tree you specify — the positive control.
capabilities	Engine version, 215 substitution models, enforced limits.

Install

pip install phylokit-mcp

piqtree ships prebuilt wheels, so there is no compiler, no R and no conda step — but it requires Python 3.12+, and so does this package.

Configure your MCP client

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "phylokit": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["phylokit-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

uvx fetches the released package on demand, so this needs no prior install — but it must resolve a Python 3.12+ interpreter, since that is piqtree's wheel floor. If uvx picks an older one, pin it with "args": ["--python", "3.12", "phylokit-mcp"].

If you installed it yourself instead, "command": "phylokit-mcp" works when the executable is on your PATH; give the absolute path to the entry point in the environment you installed into if it is not.

The same file ships as .mcp.json in this repo, which Claude Code picks up automatically when the repo is your working directory.

Reproducibility, stated precisely

Measured, not assumed:

• Across fresh processes: exact. Three runs of an identical 30-replicate bootstrap returned byte-identical support.
• Within one long-lived process: not bit-exact. Passing the same rand_seed does not fully reset IQ-TREE's internal state — building the same tree three times gave call 1 == call 2 but call 3 different.

The practical size: over six repeated 50-replicate calls, three of four clades were bit-identical and one moved 0.02 — a single replicate flipping, well inside the bootstrap's own sampling error (~0.07 at 50 replicates). The topology and every conclusion were unchanged. This is reported in every response rather than papered over, because an MCP server is long-lived by design and that is exactly the condition which exposes it.

Threads are pinned to 1 before piqtree is imported: likelihood sums accumulate in thread-completion order, floating-point addition is not associative, and near-tied topologies can flip on the last bits.

Limitations

• Nucleotide and protein alignments. Pass sequence_type="protein" and a protein model (LG, WAG, …). Codon models are still not exposed. The molecule type is declared, never sniffed: an alignment of only A/C/G/T is a valid protein alignment too (Ala/Cys/Gly/Thr), so guessing would fit a nucleotide model to protein data and return a tree, a likelihood and support values that are all wrong and none of which complain.
• Bootstrap only — no aLRT, no approximate Bayes, no UFBoot. Support is the nonparametric bootstrap (Felsenstein 1985), computed here rather than read back from IQ-TREE, because piqtree 0.8.3 runs bootstrap_replicates but does not expose the resulting values.
• Cost is linear in replicates. ~130 ms per replicate at 7 taxa / 300 sites, and it grows with taxon count. Capped at 200 taxa and 1000 replicates.
• It does not align sequences. Ragged input is refused, not guessed at.
• Unrooted trees. No rooting, no dating, no ancestral reconstruction.

Licence

GPL-2.0-only. The "only" is load-bearing: piqtree declares GPL-2.0-only, which is incompatible with GPL-3.0, so the distributed combination cannot be GPL-3. cogent3 is BSD and imposes nothing.

Unofficial. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the IQ-TREE authors or the cogent3 project. IQ-TREE 2 is academic software and expects to be cited — if results from this server appear in published work, cite IQ-TREE 2 as directed at iqtree.org, not this wrapper. See NOTICE.