HyphAeon

The Depth of Evolution — Neural selection inference using a phylogenetic foundation model.

HyphAeon operates along the SITE axis of the foundation model, providing episodic positive selection detection, 3D macromolecular epistasis, in silico DMS sweeps, and phenotype attribution.

Target Audience

Comparative evolutionary biologists, structural virologists, protein biochemists.

Installation

HyphAeon requires Python ≥ 3.8 and PyTorch ≥ 2.0. At runtime it auto-selects the best available device (CUDA → Apple MPS → CPU), so no manual configuration is needed regardless of which install path you choose.

pip install hyphaeon

You can always install a specific PyTorch build before installing HyphAeon if none of the above defaults suit your system (e.g. a particular CUDA version, a custom wheel, or a CPU-only build on a server without GPU).

CLI Subcommands

Key Capabilities

• Selection Inference — MEME/BUSTED-style episodic positive selection via neural LRTs
• Epistasis — 3D macromolecular epistatic sector detection (CESI)
• DMS — In silico deep mutational scanning sweeps (ESSM)
• Phenotype Attribution — PhyloWAS/PARS phenotype-genotype associations
• Spectral Splits — Phylogenetic spectral bisection for clade analysis

The Radar & Microscope Flywheel

HyphAeon is the Microscope: takes clades flagged by ChronAeon (the Radar) and dissects why they emerged — identifying positive selection bursts, functional epistatic rewiring, or host-jump phenotypic signatures. Together they form a collaborative flywheel for genomic surveillance and deep evolutionary analysis.

Reproducible Benchmark Examples

Example 1: Inter-Site Epistasis & Branch Co-Selection in HIV-1 Reverse Transcriptase

# Run branch co-selection, sector mining, and export co-selection network with Monte Carlo permutation testing
hyphaeon epistasis \
  -a examples/HIV1_RT.fasta \
  -t examples/HIV1_RT.nwk \
  --n-permutations 10000 \
  --max-perm-p 0.05 \
  -o examples/HIV1_RT_epistasis.json \
  -c examples/HIV1_RT_edges.csv \
  --graphml examples/HIV1_RT_coselection.graphml

Key Biological Discoveries:

1. Unsupervised Discovery of Multi-Drug Catalytic Complexes (Q151M MDR Complex):
   • HyphAeon places the co-evolution of residue 116 with residue 151 at #1 overall across all candidate pairs:

     F116 ⟷ Q151 (Co-Sel = 0.8660, p_hyper = 7.02 × 10⁻⁹, FDR q = 1.17 × 10⁻⁷)

2. Autonomous Dissection of Mutually Exclusive Pathways (TAM-1 vs. TAM-2):
   • HyphAeon's branch co-selection metric autonomously isolates the TAM-1 triad (M41L + L210W + T215Y, q < 10⁻⁷) from the mutually antagonistic TAM-2 cluster (D67N + K70R + K219Q, q < 10⁻³).

Monte Carlo Permutation Testing for Epistatic Sectors:

To distinguish authentic structural/functional sectors from stochastic subsets of variable sites, HyphAeon tests the spectral coherence of candidate sectors against an empirical null distribution:

• Vectorized Permutation Engine (--n-permutations <int>, default: 10000): For a discovered sector S of size K, samples B random K-site subgraphs uniformly without replacement from active candidate sites. Coherence is computed across null batches via tensor contraction and Hermitian eigenvalue decomposition:

  C(S) = λ₁(A[S, :] A[S, :]ᵀ) / Tr(A[S, :] A[S, :]ᵀ)
  

• Output Metrics: Each sector reports empirical one-sided permutation p-value:

  p_perm = (1/B) Σ I(C(S^(b)) ≥ C(S))
  

  along with null mean E[C_null], standard deviation, 95th percentile cutoff C₉₅, and theoretical isotropic baseline 1/K. Set --n-permutations 0 to disable permutation testing.
• Empirical Filtering (--max-perm-p <float>, default: None): Retains only sectors whose spectral coherence satisfies p_perm ≤ threshold (e.g., --max-perm-p 0.05).

Example 2: In Silico Selection Deep Mutational Scanning (Digital DMS / ESSM)

# Run digital DMS sweep on HIV-1 RT
hyphaeon dms -a examples/HIV1_RT.fasta -t examples/HIV1_RT.nwk -o examples/HIV1_RT_dms.json -c examples/HIV1_RT_dms.csv

Example 3: Convergent Sensory Adaptation & Spectral Tuning in Rhodopsin

# Run PhyloWAS with trait sector permutation testing and gene-level phylogenetic permulations
hyphaeon phenotype \
  -a examples/RHO.fasta \
  -fg "turTru,balMus,balPhys,orcOrc,delDelp,phyCat,phoVit,halGryp,mirLeo,zalCali,odoRos" \
  --n-permutations 10000 \
  --max-perm-p 0.05 \
  --permulations 1000 \
  -o examples/RHO_marine_phenotype.json \
  -c examples/RHO_marine_sites.csv

Multi-Scale Permutation & Null Testing in PhyloWAS:

HyphAeon implements two complementary null testing layers addressing distinct evolutionary hypotheses:

1. Macromolecular Trait Sector Permutations (--n-permutations <int>, default: 10000; --max-perm-p <float>, default: None):
   • Following single-site phenotype association (FDR q ≤ α), HyphAeon extracts coherent epistatic sectors among trait-associated residues.
   • Tests whether trait sector coherence C(S) significantly exceeds random K-site subgraphs sampled across the alignment (p_perm ≤ max_perm_p), confirming that convergent phenotype adaptation drives coordinated macromolecular re-organization rather than unlinked mutations.
2. Gene-Level Brownian Motion Liability Permulations (--permulations <int>, default: 0 / parametric):
   • Simulates neutral continuous phenotype evolution along the phylogenetic tree using Brownian motion (Saputra et al. 2021 / RERconverge null model).
   • Computes empirical gene-level p-values (p_gene) testing whether the length-normalized spectral energy (Ψ̄) or maximum site association (ρ_max) exceeds neutral phylogenetic drift.

Example 4: Ultra-Fast Episodic Positive Selection, Feature Attribution & Alignment Error Filtering

# Standard per-codon episodic selection inference
hyphaeon meme -a examples/Smc6.fasta -t examples/Smc6.nwk -o examples/Smc6_results.json -c examples/Smc6_results.csv

# Enable mechanistic feature attribution (identifies driving species & evolutionary timing)
hyphaeon meme -a examples/Smc6.fasta -t examples/Smc6.nwk --attribute --attribution-min-lrt 3.84 -o examples/Smc6_attributed.json

# Run inference with automated dual-stage alignment error filtering & export cleaned alignment
hyphaeon meme -a examples/Smc6.fasta -t examples/Smc6.nwk --filter --filter-out-aln examples/Smc6_cleaned.fasta -c examples/Smc6_clean.csv

1. Mechanistic Feature Attribution (--attribute):

• Single-Taxon Counterfactual Perturbation (ΔLRT): In silico mutates each non-consensus species back to ancestral state to rank driving taxa by marginal selection evidence explained (% Signal Explained).
• Evolutionary Epoch Decomposition: Classifies selection timing by weighted root patristic depth into Recent Terminal / Tip Sweep (≥ 0.60), Intermediate Subclade Burst (0.35–0.60), and Deep Ancestral / Basal Divergence (< 0.35), separating Recurrent Multi-Lineage Adaptation from single-lineage sweeps.

2. Automated Alignment Error Screening (--filter):

• Dual-Stage Algorithm: Detects 1D selective clusters via exact upper-tail hypergeometric scan (p_local ≤ 0.01), then evaluates the Outlier Contamination Index (OCI ≥ 0.25) to flag private frameshifts (≥ 3 contiguous radical mutations in an isolated leaf against conserved species).
• Surgical In-Place Masking: Automatically masks only the guilty taxon's anomalous span with NNN and re-evaluates the cleaned alignment in milliseconds, eliminating false positives while preserving legitimate multi-species selection.

Example 5: Spectral Graph Bisection & Tree-Free Phylogenetic Splits

# Basic Tree-Free Macro-Split Discovery (Outputs Newick Tree & Clade CSV)
hyphaeon splits \
  -a examples/bat_oas1.fasta \
  --no-tree \
  -o examples/bat_oas1_spectral_tree.nwk \
  -c examples/bat_oas1_clades.csv \
  --cpu

Spectral Bisection Architecture:

• Multi-Modal Affinity Fusion: Combines cross-taxa attention matrices ($\bar{\mathbf{A}}$) from the axial transformer, continuous 4D metric space from Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) on pairwise distances, and sequence-level latent representations into a fused affinity matrix $\mathbf{A}{\text{fused}} = \mathbf{S}{\text{attn}} \odot \mathbf{K}{\text{MDS}} \odot \mathbf{K}{\text{emb}}$.
• Normalized Graph Laplacian & Fiedler Vector: Partitions taxa along the Fiedler vector $\mathbf{v}2$ of $\mathbf{L}{\text{sym}} = \mathbf{I} - \mathbf{D}^{-1/2} \mathbf{A}_{\text{fused}} \mathbf{D}^{-1/2}$, quantifying macro-clade split stability via the spectral eigengap $\Delta\lambda = \lambda_3 - \lambda_2$.
• Comprehensive Benchmarks: See SPECTRAL_SPLITS_BENCHMARK.md for full benchmarks against IQ-TREE 2, RAxML-NG, FastTree, and Neighbor-Joining across empirical datasets.

Retraining & Fine-Tuning

1. Build per-gene training tensors

Prepare one alignment and one official HyPhy MEME JSON result per gene. Trees may be supplied as matching Newick files or embedded in the alignments:

python training/build_training_npz.py \
  --alignment_dir /path/to/training_alignments/ \
  --tree_dir /path/to/trees/ \
  --meme_dir /path/to/meme_results/ \
  --output_dir /path/to/training_npz/

2. Fine-tune the foundation model

python training/train.py \
  --data_dir /path/to/training_npz/ \
  --epochs 30 \
  --batch_size 1 \
  --lr 3e-4 \
  --embed_dim 384 \
  --layers 6 \
  --heads 12 \
  --fp16 \
  --output_dir /path/to/run_weights/

Documentation

• Architecture
• Migration Guide
• Spectral Splits Benchmark
• Temporal Analysis Guide