Treehouse: a user-friendly application to obtain subtrees from large phylogenies

BMC Res Notes. 2019 Aug 27;12(1):541. doi: 10.1186/s13104-019-4577-5.

Abstract

Objective: Phylogenetic trees that contain hundreds to thousands of taxa are now routinely generated. Retrieving the relationships among a subset of taxa in these large phylogenies can be a challenging or time-consuming task. Addressing this challenge requires the development of tools that facilitate the easy retrieval of subtrees from any user-specified set of taxa in a given phylogeny.

Results: We developed treehouse, an open source tool that enables the retrieval of any subtree from a given large phylogeny. With a three-step workflow, treehouse successfully allows a user to obtain a subtree from any phylogeny. Treehouse can help researchers to explore the relationships among any set of taxa from across the tree of life. Treehouse is implemented as a shiny application in the R programming language. Treehouse software and usage instructions are publicly available at https://github.com/JLSteenwyk/treehouse .

Keywords: Big data; Graphical user interface; Phylogenetics; Phylogenomics; Shiny; Tree; Tree pruning.

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Evolution, Molecular
  • Humans
  • Information Storage and Retrieval / methods*
  • Internet
  • Phylogeny*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Software*