Visualising very large phylogenetic trees in three dimensional hyperbolic space
Published in the April 2004 BMC Bioinformatics journal

Timothy Hughes
Bergen Centre for Computational Science
University of Bergen, Norway

Young Hyun
Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis - CAIDA
San Diego Supercomputer Center,
University of California, San Diego

David A. Liberles
Bergen Centre for Computational Science
University of Bergen, Norway

Common existing phylogenetic tree visualisation tools are not able to display readable trees with more than a few thousand nodes. These existing methodologies are based in two dimensional space. We introduce the idea of visualising phylogenetic trees in three dimensional hyperbolic space with the Walrus graph visualisation tool and have developed a conversion tool that enables the conversion of standard phylogenetic tree formats to Walrus' format. With Walrus, it becomes possible to visualise and navigate phylogenetic trees with more than 100,000 nodes. Walrus enables desktop visualisation of very large phylogenetic trees in 3 dimensional hyperbolic space. This application is potentially useful for visualisation of the tree of life and for functional genomics derivatives, like The Adaptive Evolution Database (TAED).