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Karen Cranston, Adam Kubach, Kristopher Urie (National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, Durham, USA; Texas Advanced Computing Center, Austin, USA; Biodiversity Synthesis Center, Chicago, USA)
Visualization of evolutionary trees is a long-studied problem, which has become more critical as the size of published phylogenies increases in parallel with the availability of molecular sequence data. The iPlant Collaborative Tree of Life project has developed a web-based visualization tool for exploration and presentation of phylogenies with hundreds of thousands of leaves. The interface provides an overview of the whole phylogeny plus a detail view where the user can pan and zoom on the tree detail, with clades collapsing and expanding automatically. This level of detail rendering facilitates scalability by managing the amount of data sent to the client, allowing for decreased loading time and giving performance comparable to traditional desktop applications. The interface supports the annotation of nodes, branches and subtrees in order to associate a tree with other types of metadata. The application uses Google Web Toolkit (GWT) for the user interface and client/server communication, and is architected in a way that separates the core rendering capabilities and user interface into libraries, allowing integration of this viewer into other websites.