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. 2007 Nov 22:8:460.
doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-8-460.

Dendroscope: An interactive viewer for large phylogenetic trees

Daniel H Huson  1 , Daniel C Richter, Christian Rausch, Tobias Dezulian, Markus Franz, Regula Rupp
Affiliations

Dendroscope: An interactive viewer for large phylogenetic trees

Daniel H Huson et al. BMC Bioinformatics. .

Abstract

Background: Research in evolution requires software for visualizing and editing phylogenetic trees, for increasingly very large datasets, such as arise in expression analysis or metagenomics, for example. It would be desirable to have a program that provides these services in an efficient and user-friendly way, and that can be easily installed and run on all major operating systems. Although a large number of tree visualization tools are freely available, some as a part of more comprehensive analysis packages, all have drawbacks in one or more domains. They either lack some of the standard tree visualization techniques or basic graphics and editing features, or they are restricted to small trees containing only tens of thousands of taxa. Moreover, many programs are difficult to install or are not available for all common operating systems.

Results: We have developed a new program, Dendroscope, for the interactive visualization and navigation of phylogenetic trees. The program provides all standard tree visualizations and is optimized to run interactively on trees containing hundreds of thousands of taxa. The program provides tree editing and graphics export capabilities. To support the inspection of large trees, Dendroscope offers a magnification tool. The software is written in Java 1.4 and installers are provided for Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows XP.

Conclusion: Dendroscope is a user-friendly program for visualizing and navigating phylogenetic trees, for both small and large datasets.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Homo sapiens in the NCBI taxonomy. The placement of Homo sapiens and the Hominidae in the NCBI taxonomy, as displayed in Dendroscope using the program's magnifier feature.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Four different views of the same dataset. Four different views for the same dataset of 28 sequences of genera of the daisy family: (a) circular cladogram, (b) radial phylogram, (c) rectangular phylogram, and (d) slanted cladogram.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Formatting nodes and edges of a tree. Dendroscope provides a dialog box for formatting the nodes and edges of a tree; the example shows a tree drawn as an internal circular cladogram.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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