Phylo.io: interactive viewing and comparison of large phylogenetic trees on the web

TL;DR

Phylo.io is a web-based tool that enables interactive visualization and comparison of large phylogenetic trees, highlighting similarities and differences, with features supporting scalability, sharing, and usability.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable, user-friendly web application for visualizing and comparing large phylogenetic trees, addressing limitations of existing tools.

Findings

Supports very large trees efficiently

Highlights similarities and differences automatically

Enables sharing and storing visualizations

Abstract

Phylogenetic trees are pervasively used to depict evolutionary relationships. Increasingly, researchers need to visualize large trees and compare multiple large trees inferred for the same set of taxa (reflecting uncertainty in the tree inference or genuine discordance among the loci analysed). Existing tree visualization tools are however not well suited to these tasks. In particular, side-by-side comparison of trees can prove challenging beyond a few dozen taxa. Here, we introduce Phylo.io, a web application to visualize and compare phylogenetic trees side-by-side. Its distinctive features are: highlighting of similarities and differences between two trees, automatic identification of the best matching rooting and leaf order, scalability to very large trees, high usability, multiplatform support via standard HTML5 implementation, and possibility to store and share visualisations. The tool can be freely accessed at http://phylo.io. The code for the associated JavaScript library is available at https://github.com/DessimozLab/phylo-io under an MIT open source license.