MKado: a toolkit for McDonald-Kreitman tests of natural selection
Abstract
Abstract Summary MKado is a Python toolkit for performing McDonald-Kreitman (MK) tests of natural selection from aligned coding sequences. It implements the standard MK test as well as a wide variety of its extensions and related statistics, including a number of methods for estimating the fraction of adaptive substitutions ( α ) while accounting for slightly deleterious mutations, with a unified command-line interface and Python API. MKado supports parallel batch processing of thousands of genes with near-linear scaling, and provides publication-ready visualizations including volcano plots and asymptotic α curves. Availability and Implementation MKado is freely available at https://github.com/kr-colab/mkado under the MIT license. Full documentation is available at https://mkado.readthedocs.io . MKado is implemented in Python and installable via pip . Contact adkern@uoregon.edu
Fields of Study & Subjects
Genetic Associations and Epidemiology
Genetic and phenotypic traits in livestock
Genetic diversity and population structure
Publication details
- Journal / source
- bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
- Publisher
- openRxiv
- Publication date
- 4 March 2026
- Language
- EN
- Document type
- Preprint