Visualising very large phylogenetic trees in three dimensional hyperbolic space

BACKGROUND: Common existing phylogenetic tree visualisation tools are not able to display readable trees with more than a few thousand nodes. These existing methodologies are based in two dimensional space. RESULTS: We introduce the idea of visualising phylogenetic trees in three dimensional hyperbolic space with the Walrus graph visualisation tool and have developed a conversion tool that enables the conversion of standard phylogenetic tree formats to Walrus' format. With Walrus, it becomes possible to visualise and navigate phylogenetic trees with more than 100,000 nodes. CONCLUSION: Walrus enables desktop visualisation of very large phylogenetic trees in 3 dimensional hyperbolic space. This application is potentially useful for visualisation of the tree of life and for functional genomics derivatives, like The Adaptive Evolution Database (TAED)

ViCTree: an automated framework for taxonomic classification from protein sequences

Motivation: The increasing rate of submission of genetic sequences into public databases is providing a growing resource for classifying the organisms that these sequences represent. To aid viral classification, we have developed ViCTree, which automatically integrates the relevant sets of sequences in NCBI GenBank and transforms them into an interactive maximum likelihood phylogenetic tree that can be updated automatically. ViCTree incorporates ViCTreeView, which is a JavaScript-based visualisation tool that enables the tree to be explored interactively in the context of pairwise distance data. Results: To demonstrate utility, ViCTree was applied to subfamily Densovirinae of family Parvoviridae. This led to the identification of six new species of insect virus. Availability: ViCTree is open-source and can be run on any Linux- or Unix-based computer or cluster. A tutorial, the documentation and the source code are available under a GPL3 license, and can be accessed at http://bioinformatics.cvr.ac.uk/victree_web/

TreeViewJ: An Application for Viewing and Analyzing Phylogenetic Trees

BACKGROUND. Phylogenetic trees are widely used to visualize evolutionary relationships between different organisms or samples of the same organism. There exists a variety of both free and commercial tree visualization software available, but limitations in these programs often require researchers to use multiple programs for analysis, annotation, and the production of publication-ready images. RESULTS. We present TreeViewJ, a Java tool for visualizing, editing and analyzing phylogenetic trees. The software allows researchers to color and change the width of branches that they wish to highlight, and add names to nodes. If collection dates are available for taxa, the software can map them onto a timeline, and sort the tree in ascending or descending date order. CONCLUSION. TreeViewJ is a tool for researchers to visualize, edit, "decorate," and produce publication-ready images of phylogenetic trees. It is open-source, and released under an GPL license, and available at http://treeviewj.sourceforge.net

Hyperconvexity and Tight Span Theory for Diversities

The tight span, or injective envelope, is an elegant and useful construction that takes a metric space and returns the smallest hyperconvex space into which it can be embedded. The concept has stimulated a large body of theory and has applications to metric classification and data visualisation. Here we introduce a generalisation of metrics, called diversities, and demonstrate that the rich theory associated to metric tight spans and hyperconvexity extends to a seemingly richer theory of diversity tight spans and hyperconvexity.Comment: revised in response to referee comment

Interactive visualisation and exploration of biological data

International audienceno abstrac

SPREAD 4:Online visualisation of pathogen phylogeographic reconstructions

Phylogeographic analyses aim to extract information about pathogen spread from genomic data, and visualising spatio-temporal reconstructions is a key aspect of this process. Here we present SPREAD 4, a feature-rich web-based application that visualises estimates of pathogen dispersal resulting from Bayesian phylogeographic inference using BEAST on a geographic map, offering zoom-and-filter functionality and smooth animation over time. SPREAD 4 takes as input phylogenies with both discrete and continuous location annotation and offers customised visualisation as well as generation of publication-ready figures. SPREAD 4 now features account-based storage and easy sharing of visualisations by means of unique web addresses. SPREAD 4 is intuitive to use and is available online at https://spreadviz.org, with an accompanying web page containing answers to frequently asked questions at https://beast.community/spread4

Annotation of Tribolium nuclear receptors reveals an evolutionary overacceleration of a network controlling the ecdysone cascade

The Tribolium genome contains 21 nuclear receptors, representing all of the six known subfamilies. When compared to other species, this first complete set for a Coleoptera reveals a strong conservation of the number and identity of nuclear receptors in holometabolous insects. Two novelties are observed: the atypical NR0 gene knirps is present only in brachyceran flies, while the NR2E6 gene is found only in Tribolium and in Apis. Using a quantitative analysis of the evolutionary rate, we discovered that nuclear receptors could be divided into two groups. In one group of 13 proteins, the rates follow the trend of the Mecopterida genome-wide acceleration. In a second group of five nuclear receptors, all acting together at the top of the ecdysone cascade, we observed an overacceleration of the evolutionary rate during the early divergence of Mecopterida. We thus extended our analysis to the twelve classic ecdysone transcriptional regulators and found that six of them (ECR, USP, HR3, E75, HR4 and Kr-h1) underwent an overacceleration at the base of the Mecopterida lineage. By contrast, E74, E93, BR, HR39, FTZ-F1 and E78 do not show this divergence. We suggest that coevolution occurred within a network of regulators that control the ecdysone cascade. The advent of Tribolium as a powerful model should allow a better understanding of this evolution