A simple Visual Tree Comparison Tool
Simon Berger has developped a simple graphical tree comparison tool that highlights differences
between up to four trees by highlighting the branches
(bipartitions/splits) that are not shared among those trees.
The JAVA code can be downloaded
here
There are three different operating modes:
- run it on the command line and output a phyloxml file that
can be viewed with any compatible tree viewer: "java -jar vtd.jar tree1
tree2 > out.xml"
- run on the command line and start the archeopteryx tree
viewer to view the differences between tree1 and tree2: "java -jar
vtd.jar tree1 tree2 -v"
- GUI mode: just type "java -jar vtd.jar" and a file dialogue
will open to select input tree files
In the default mode (when two trees are supplied) branches that occur
(are shared) in both trees are colored white, missing branches are red.
If you open more than two trees, the tool will do a multi
tree comparison (this works for up to 4 tree files).
In this mode the first tree will be compared to the remaining trees.
The branch coloring is then based on rgb color mixing: If a branch
exists in trees 1 and 2 it is colored red. If it exists in trees 1 and
3/4 it will be green/blue.
If a branch exists in more than two trees the colors are mixed
(red+green=yellow, red+green+blue=white and so on...).
Here is a screen shot where we compare two small 10 taxon trees: