Original Phylo.io is a state of the art tool for visualising and comparing phylogenetic trees on the web. Phylo.io includes a number of useful features to make the viewing and comparing of even very large trees extremely easy. In our case, only the visualise-related functionality is used.
After selecting the button "draw trees with Phylo.io", two chosen trees will be appear in the viewing area as shown in Fig 1.
Fig. 1
If the tree is too large, by default is collapsed to a certain depth. A collapsed node is denoted by a triangle as seen in Fig. 2. The collapse depth can be changed using the option in the settings panel as shown in Fig. 3. Also, clicking a node gives an array of options as seen in Fig. 4. 'expand' uncollapses the single node, 'expand all' uncollapses all nodes in that node's subtree and 'higlight' highlights the selected node in the neighboring tree.
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
There are a four controls overlayed on the visualisation that allow:
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Clicking the first menu button in Fig. 9 brings up the search box. If you start typing in here, suggested results will appear instantly. Click on the taxon you are looking for and its position in the tree will be highlighted in red along with the path to that leaf from the root of the tree.
Fig. 9
Underneath each tree visualised, a dyanmic scale is drawn showing the length metric for that tree Fig. 10. This updates in real time as you zoom in and explore the tree. Alternatively, if you want to view the tree without the branch lengths taken into account, you can turn this off in settings Fig. 11. If lengths are turned off, the visualisation will update in real time to reflect this.
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
There are a number of options available to change the styling of the visualisation Fig. 12 as well as the text displayed on internal nodes Fig.13. Changing these settings will cause the visualisation to update in real time.
Fig. 12
Fig. 13