A Colour-Filling Approach for Visualising Trait Evolution with Phylogenies

The development of powerful visualisation tools is a major challenge in bioinformatics. Phylogenetics, a field with a growing impact on a variety of life science areas, is experiencing an increasing but poorly met requirement for software supporting the advanced visualisation of phylogenies. This paper describes a new method to visualise trait evolution across a phylogenetic tree by using colour to represent ancestral trait values. This space-efficient method supports trait visualisation on very large phylogenetic trees, and adds a new dimension to the conventional phylogenetic tree representation in order to convey extra information. Initial usability tests by phylogeneticists show that this technique indeed enhances their data analysis processes