DensiTree: making sense of sets of phylogenetic trees.

Abstract

Bayesian analysis through programs like BEAST (Drummond and Rumbaut, 2007) and MrBayes (Huelsenbeck et al., 2001) provides a powerful method for reconstruction of evolutionary relationships. One of the benefits of Bayesian methods is that well-founded estimates of uncertainty in models can be made available. So, for example, not only the mean time of a most recent common ancestor (tMRCA) is estimated, but also the spread. This distribution over model space is represented by a set of trees, which can be rather large and difficult to interpret. DensiTree is a tool that helps navigating these sets of trees.