I enjoyed this cartoon from xkcd (via genetic future).
Category: Uncategorized
TreeGradients
I came across a nice program by Heroen Verbruggen called TreeGradients. “TreeGradients is a tree drawing program. The tree drawing options are fairly basic but the program has the ability to plot several types of continuous variables at the nodes in colors and use linear color gradients to fill the branches between nodes. The output…
SWAMI and the CIPRES portal
CIPRES may be about to have a data handling overhaul. If you haven’t clicked around on the CIPRES site do so, its great. Cyberinfrastructure for Phylogenetic Research (CIPRES) project is an open collaboration funded by the National Science Foundation…The goal of the CIPRES project is to enable large-scale phylogenetic reconstructions on a scale that will…
Species numbers
Christopher Taylor at the excellent Catalogue of Organisms has a thought provoking post on the taxonomic diversity of described species. He has a picture of animal groups, plants and fungi scaled by number of described species. I like these sorts of pictures; they are great for shocking undergraduates who have never really thought about the…
Google Maps and Phylogenies
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…
Genome Projector for trees?
It seems that Genome Projector has swept the blogosphere over the last 24 hours. I’ve seen it listed on many of the blogs I’m reading. It looks very good and intuitive. I just wanted to mention a couple of things.This is a beautiful example of what happens when open source software is championed. Google maps…
The Animal Tree of Life
There’s an interesting paper in Nature on animal phylogeny. The authors take an EST approach adding multi-gene data for 11 new animal phyla and increasing data for others. Dunn et al. “Broad phylogenomic sampling improves resolution of the animal tree of life” Nature. Published online 5 March 2008 doi:10.1038/nature06614 Abstract: Long-held ideas regarding the evolutionary…
SupraMap- Google Earth Trees
I came across SupraMap today. This is a way to overlay phylogenetic trees onto Google Earth images and examine the geographic distribution of the OTUs. Although there have been several postings before at iPhylo, and CIPRES and an implementation for Mesquite, the work at SupraMap looks quite polished. There is a video, and detailed instructions…
EvoPhylo 