murka (pronounced M-oo-rka, 'she-cat' in Russian) is a free software for inferring parsimonious phylogenies (i.e. trees of the minimal cost) from alignments of biological sequences. The theory behind this software is a combination of two algorithmic approaches: building median networks (which were introduced in early 80s in Algebra and later appeared to be very useful in Phylogenetics) and extracting Steiner trees from graphs. The advantage of this combination in one algorithm is almost complete coverage of the minimum cost trees from a source alignment and tolerate performance for many instances hardly to be completely solved by classical methods, particularly those working with topologies. In addition to exact algorithms, median-based heuristic methods are also available.

Murka is a command-line application, it works fine both on Linux and Windows platforms. Currently two hardware architectures are supported: x86(ia-32) and ia-64 (Itanium2). We chose GNU Autotools to conduct the compilation and installation on POSIX platforms, while on MS Windows only a manual installation is available.

Murka is provided with the source code for Linux and Windows, you may compile it for your hardware platform either 32- or 64-bit. The program has been tested on the following architectures:
1. Linux x86
2. Linux ia64 (Itanium 2)
3. Windows NT/2000/XP x86

Binaries are available for all the mentioned platforms.

The license of this software is Free, you can free download and free use this calculator software.