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
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:
