The prestigious scientific journal Nature has named a software developed at Temple University among the top-100 most-cited scientific works in history. Professor Sudhir Kumar’s 2016 article describing Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis (MEGA) version 7 (MEGA7) is recognized alongside seminal works in biochemistry, artificial intelligence, and quantum physics.

Kumar joined CST in 2014 to launch the Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine (iGEM), where his international team developed MEGA’s seventh version to meet the demands of researchers analyzing large-scale genomic data. Since its release, MEGA7 has earned more than 45,000 citations, making it one of the youngest and fastest-climbing articles ever to break into Nature’s top-100 list.

"This achievement is a testament to the foundational role evolutionary analysis plays in understanding everything from species origins to biodiversity and diseases," said Kumar, Laura H. Carnell Professor in the Department of Biology at the College of Science and Technology. As iGEM’s founding director, Kumar has helped Temple build a global hub for advancing genomics and evolutionary biology through computational innovations.

First launched in the 1990s and now downloaded over three million times, the MEGA software suite provides essential tools for constructing evolutionary trees and performing statistical analyses of molecular data. The seventh version, co-authored by long-time collaborators Kochiro Tamura and Glen Stecher, delivers major performance optimizations enabling large-scale evolutionary analyses in an era of big data, making it an indispensable tool for biologists worldwide.

Unlike most papers on Nature’s list, which often date back decades and describe foundational biochemical techniques, the MEGA7 article is among the few published in the past decade to earn this recognition. While a handful of papers published after 2015 have earned a place on Nature’s list, most notably landmarks in deep learning: “Attention is All You Need” (Vaswani et al., 2017) and “BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding” (Devlin et al., 2018), Temple’s MEGA7 stands as the sole paper from the natural sciences among these.

Kumar's paper is not only a scientific milestone for Temple and iGEM, but evidence of a profound shift in science. Software, computation and evolutionary thinking are now driving discovery at unprecedented scales. Several other top-100 papers are from evolutionary and molecular biology, including “Basic local alignment search tool” (Altschul et al., 1990) and “The neighbor joining method” (Saitou & Nei, 1987). Together, these works affirm what genomics researchers have long recognized: comparative methods are no longer niche. They now power some of the most exciting advances in both experimental and computational science, with Temple at its core.