TreeSnatcher plus: capturing phylogenetic trees from images

TreeSnatcher plus: capturing phylogenetic trees from images

Abstract

Background Figures of phylogenetic trees are widely used to illustrate the result of evolutionary analyses. However, one cannot easily extract a machine-readable representation from such images. Therefore, new software emerges that helps to preserve phylogenies digitally for future research. Results TreeSnatcher Plus is a GUI-driven JAVA application that semi-automatically generates a Newick format for multifurcating, arbitrarily shaped, phylogenetic trees contained in pixel images. It offers a range of image pre-processing methods and detects the topology of a depicted tree with adequate user assistance. The user supervises the recognition process, makes corrections to the image and to the topology and repeats steps if necessary. At the end TreeSnatcher Plus produces a Newick tree code optionally including branch lengths for rectangular and freeform trees. Conclusions Although illustrations of phylogenies exist in a vast number of styles, TreeSnatcher Plus imposes no limitations on the images it can process with adequate user assistance. Given that a fully automated digitization of all figures of phylogenetic trees is desirable but currently unrealistic, TreeSnatcher Plus is the only program that reliably facilitates at least a semi-automatic conversion from such figures into a machine-readable format.

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Authors
  • Von Haeseler, Arndt
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Shortfacts
Category
Journal Paper
Divisions
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Journal or Publication Title
BMC Bioinform.
ISSN
1471-2105
Page Range
p. 110
Volume
13
Date
2012
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