Dendroscope: An interactive viewer for large phylogenetic trees

1Phylogenetic trees are used to represent evolutionary relationships between biological taxa, while taxonomical hierarchies such as the NCBI taxonomy are used to structure the wealth of molecular sequence data. The size of trees under consideration is growing larger and larger.

2The Tree of Life project, which aims at reconstructing the evolutionary relationship of all living species on earth, now considers more than 11,000 species. The Ribosomal Database Project II provides a hierarchical browser for a collection of approximately 340,000 ribosomal RNA sequences. Recent metagenomic analysis software makes use of the full NCBI taxonomy, which now contains more than 390,000 taxa, to estimate the taxonomical content of a dataset.

3Most currently available tree viewers are designed to handle trees containing up to a few thousand nodes. A notable exception is TreeJuxtaposer, which was explicitly designed to visualize large trees. While TreeJuxtaposer is the tool of choice for very large datasets (containing hundreds of thousands of taxa), it has limited value as an all-round tree visualization tool, as it only implements one particular tree view (namely the rectangular phylogram, perhaps because this is the only view that is useful for large trees), it lacks basic graphics export capabilities and it does not allow one to save and reopen a modified tree.

4Dendroscope is designed as an all-round tree visualization tool that can handle trees with hundred thousands of taxa (see Figure 1). Trees can be read and written in Newick or Nexus format, as produced by standard tree reconstruction programs. Additionally, Dendroscope uses its own file format to save and reopen (lists of) trees that have been edited graphically using different colors, line widths and fonts.

5A tree can be displayed in a number of views, namely as a circular, radial or rectangular phylogram, as (an internal or external) circular, rectangular or slanted cladogram, or as an unrooted diagram (see Figure 2). The nodes, edges and labels of a tree can be interactively formatted and edited (see Figure 3). Trees can be rerooted and subtrees can be rotated, collapsed, extracted and removed. In the rectangular and slanted views, a horizontal magnifier band can be used to enlarge a part of the tree. In the circular and radial views, a circular magnifier is available, which can also be switched to "magnify all mode", if desired (in which the complete tree is visible under the magnifier). A search tool can be used to find and locate taxa in the tree. All views are exportable as EPS, SVG, PNG, JPEG, GIF and BMP graphic files. Installers are available for Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows XP.

6In a survery of existing tree vizualisation and manipulation programs we screened over 40 programs (for extensive lists of such programs, e.g. see). In Table 1, we compare Dendroscope to a selection of tree viewing programs which are either widely used or have exceptional features: ATV, HyperTree, MEGA, PHYLIP's drawtree/drawgram, SplitsTree4, TreeView, TreeJuxtaposer and TreeDyn. Of the existing programs, only TreeJuxtaposer and PHYLIP's drawtree and drawgram can handle very large trees. PHYLIP's drawtree and drawgram are non-interactive and so are of limited use. TreeJuxtaposer is currently the viewer of choice for large trees. SplitsTree4 and TreeJuxtaposer provide different mechanisms for comparing two or more trees. TreeDyn provides useful features such as scriptability, interoperability with tree databases and especially the possibility to display and manipulate many trees in parallel. Its drawbacks are the limit to trees of only moderate size and the complex user interface.

7The system requirements of existing viewers vary: some work only with particular versions of Unix/Linux or MacOS, or they need additional software to be installed. However, all viewers listed in Table 1 run on Linux/Unix, MacOS and Windows, except MEGA, which runs only on Windows.

8Our objective was to build a tree viewer that is able to handle a tree as large as the current version of the NCBI taxonomy. On a standard laptop, Dendroscope performs well on this tree in all rectangular and slanted views. Circular and radial view are less suitable for very large data sets. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the NCBI taxonomic tree loaded in Dendroscope showing Homo sapiens and the Hominidae. Figure 2 demonstrates some of the views provided by the program.

9With Dendroscope, we have developed a new all-round tree viewer that combines all major features found in popular viewers into a single program that can handle large datasets.

10Dendroscope is freely available and can be downloaded from. The software is written in Java 1.4 and installers are provided for Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows.

11Since we want to represent very large trees, we need to be able to focus on the crucial parts of the representation to speed up calculations. To this end, we use bounding boxes: to each subtree, we assign a box containing the subtree. The tree is drawn from the root down, and each subtree is drawn only if its bounding box is in the visible region or at least intersects with it. In addition, we compare the height of the bounding box to the number of edges it contains; if we find too many edges in a too small a box, we draw the box as an opaque single element instead of drawing each edge separately. When we want to identify the element (edge or node) at a selected position, we also make use of the bounding boxes: The tree is searched from the root down, leaving out all subtrees whose bounding boxes do not contain the selected position. This reduces the search time from (n) to (log(n)).

12We supply two different magnifiers to let the user easily access inner nodes and taxa: a horizontal magnifier band for rectangular and slanted views, and a circular one for radial tree views. In both cases, a point with distance d to the center of the magnifier is mapped to a point with distance from the center, where D denotes the diameter or height of the magnifier, as appropriate.

13To estimate the number of displayable taxa for each viewer (see Table 1), we applied the viewer to a list of trees containing increasingly large numbers of taxa: 1 k, 2 k, 5 k, 10 k, 20 k, 50 k, 100 k, 200 k, 334 k, 668 k, 1002 k, 1336 k and 2004 k. In Table 1, we report the maximal size of dataset that could be opened by the viewer, and then loaded and browsed in a reasonable amount of time (less than 90 seconds to open and an interaction response time of less than 15 seconds) on a standard workstation.

14All authors participated in the specification and testing of the program. The overall software design is credited to DHH. The program was mainly written by DHH with contributions from TD, MF, CR, DCR and RR. RR worked on the mathematical aspects of the magnification algorithm and contributed to the manuscript. CR and DCR evaluated existing tree viewers, generated test datasets and wrote the main draft of the paper. All authors read and agreed with the final manuscript.