Motivation: Population structure significantly affects evolutionary dynamics. Such structure may be due to spatial segregation, but may also reflect any other gene-flow-limiting aspect of a model. In combination with the structured coalescent, this fact can be used to inform phylogenetic tree reconstruction, as well as to infer parameters such as migration rates and subpopulation sizes from annotated sequence data. However, conducting Bayesian inference under the structured coalescent is impeded by the difficulty of constructing Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling algorithms (samplers) capable of efficiently exploring the state space. Results: In this article, we present a new MCMC sampler capable of sampling from posterior distributions over structured trees: timed phylogenetic trees in which lineages are associated with the distinct subpopulation in which they lie. The sampler includes a set of MCMC proposal functions that offer significant mixing improvements over a previously published method. Furthermore, its implementation as a BEAST 2 package ensures maximum flexibility with respect to model and prior specification. We demonstrate the usefulness of this new sampler by using it to infer migration rates and effective population sizes of H3N2 influenza between New Zealand, New York and Hong Kong from publicly available hemagglutinin (HA) gene sequences under the structured coalescent. Availability and implementation: The sampler has been implemented as a publicly available BEAST 2 package that is distributed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License at http://compevol.github.io/MultiTypeTree. Contact:tgvaughan@gmail.com Supplementary information: Supplementary Data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Summary: IcyTree is an easy-to-use application which can be used to visualize a wide variety of phylogenetic trees and networks. While numerous phylogenetic tree viewers exist already, IcyTree distinguishes itself by being a purely online tool, having a responsive user interface, supporting phylogenetic networks (ancestral recombination graphs in particular), and efficiently drawing trees that include information such as ancestral locations or trait values. IcyTree also provides intuitive panning and zooming utilities that make exploring large phylogenetic trees of many thousands of taxa feasible. Availability and Implementation: IcyTree is a web application and can be accessed directly at http://tgvaughan.github.com/icytree. Currently supported web browsers include Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. IcyTree is written entirely in client-side JavaScript (no plugin required) and, once loaded, does not require network access to run. IcyTree is free software, and the source code is made available at http://github.com/tgvaughan/icytree under version 3 of the GNU General Public License.

Significance: We estimate the origin and spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Europe prior to spring 2020 border closures based on viral genome sequences using a phylodynamic model with geographic structure. We confirm that the predominant European outbreak most likely started in Italy and spread from there. This outbreak was probably seeded by a transmission event in either Hubei, China or Germany. In particular, we find that before the first border closures in Europe, the rate of new cases occurring from within-country transmission was within or exceeded the estimated bounds on the rate of new migration cases.

Significance: Genetic recombination processes, such as reassortment, make it complex or impossible to use standard phylogenetic and phylodynamic methods. This is due to the fact that the shared evolutionary history of individuals has to be represented by a phylogenetic network instead of a tree. We therefore require novel approaches that allow us to coherently model these processes and that allow us to perform inference in the presence of such processes. Here, we introduce an approach to infer reassortment networks of segmented viruses using a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach. Our approach allows us to study different aspects of the reassortment process and allows us to show fitness benefits of reassortment events in seasonal human influenza viruses.

Modern phylodynamic methods interpret an inferred phylogenetic tree as a partial transmission chain providing information about the dynamic process of transmission and removal (where removal may be due to recovery, death, or behavior change). Birth–death and coalescent processes have been introduced to model the stochastic dynamics of epidemic spread under common epidemiological models such as the SIS and SIR models and are successfully used to infer phylogenetic trees together with transmission (birth) and removal (death) rates. These methods either integrate analytically over past incidence and prevalence to infer rate parameters, and thus cannot explicitly infer past incidence or prevalence, or allow such inference only in the coalescent limit of large population size. Here, we introduce a particle filtering framework to explicitly infer prevalence and incidence trajectories along with phylogenies and epidemiological model parameters from genomic sequences and case count data in a manner consistent with the underlying birth–death model. After demonstrating the accuracy of this method on simulated data, we use it to assess the prevalence through time of the early 2014 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone.