PEACH Tree: A Multiple Sequence Alignment and Tree Display Tool for Epidemiologists

TL;DR

PEACH Tree is an online visualization tool that displays multiple sequence alignments and phylogenetic trees with filtering options, aiding epidemiologists in tracing disease transmission and evolution efficiently.

Contribution

It introduces a user-friendly platform that integrates genomic data with epidemiological metadata, enhancing communication between genomics and epidemiology fields.

Findings

Facilitates rapid transmission history tracing

Supports filtering of invariant sites and samples

Displays epidemiological metadata effectively

Abstract

PEACH Tree is an easy-to-use, online tool for displaying multiple sequence alignments and phylogenetic trees side-by-side. PEACH Tree is powerful for rapidly tracing evolutionary and transmission histories by filtering invariant sites out of the display, and allowing samples to readily be filtered out of the display. These features, coupled with the ability to display epidemiological metadata, make the tool suitable for infectious disease epidemiology. PEACH Tree further enables much needed communication between the fields of genomics and infectious disease epidemiology, as exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic.