Following on from my previous post I decide to try Google Maps as an interface to large phylogenetic trees. This was a very quick and dirty go at seeing whether it would work as a navigable interface. I tried the implementation at MapLib which allows you to upload your own images and use Google Maps to explore them. So I uploaded some PNG images generated from big ARB trees. It worked quite well. Unfortunately there are some restrictions on image size that can be uploaded to this site so a thorough test of zooming about huge trees wasn’t really possible. But the image here is a screenshot of a smallish tree.

So, I realize that this doesn’t meet many of my own suggestions for getting information from large trees but it does have some interesting possibilities as a simple browser with a good user interface.