TreeView is a software application that allows users to view and manipulate phylogenetic trees on personal computers running MacOS or Windows operating systems. It supports a variety of tree file formats from popular phylogeny programs. Users can display tree structures and associated data like edge lengths and node labels. Individual trees or all trees from a file can be viewed. Trees can also be saved in different formats. TreeView provides a graphical user interface tailored for each operating system and allows printing and saving tree images. It aims to provide a simple program for viewing phylogenetic trees on personal computers.

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TREEVIEW: An application to display phylogenetic trees on personal computers
Article in Computer applications in the biosciences: CABIOS · September 1996
DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/12.4.357 · Source: PubMed
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2. CABIOS APPLICATIONS NOTE
Vol. 12 no. 4 1996
Pages 357-358
TreeView: An application to display phylogenetic
trees on personal computers
Roderic D.M.Page
Introduction
TreeView is a simple, easy to use phylogenetic tree viewing
utility that runs under both MacOS (on Apple Macintosh
computers) and under Microsoft Windows on Intel based
computers, the two most common personal computers
used by biologists. Some phylogeny programs, such as
PAUP (Swofford, 1993) and MacClade (Maddison and
Maddison, 1992) already provide excellent tree drawing
and printing facilities, however at present these programs
are restricted to Apple Macintosh computers. Further-
more, they require the user to load a data set before any
trees can be displayed which is inconvenient if the user
simply wants to view the trees. More portable programs,
such as DRAWGRAM and DRAWTREE in the
PHYLIP package (Felsenstein, 1993) can run on both
MacOS and Windows computers, but make little, if any
use of the graphical interface features available under
those operating systems. TreeView runs as a native
application on either MacOS or Windows computers,
enables the user to use the standard fonts installed on their
machine, their printer, and supports the relevant native
graphics format (PICT and Windows metafile) for either
creating graphics files or pasting pictures to other
applications via the clipboard. The program also supports
standard file operations, such as 'drag and drop' whereby
dragging a file's icon onto the program opens that file.
TreeView can read a range of tree file formats (see below)
and can display trees in a range of styles (Fig. 1).
Additional information, such as edge lengths and internal
node labels can also be displayed. The order of the
terminal taxa in the tree can be altered, and the tree can be
rerooted. If the tree file contains more than one tree the
user can view each tree in turn. The program can also save
trees in a variety of file formats, so that it can be used to
move trees between programs that use different file
formats.
Tree file formats
TreeView can read tree files produced by the CLUSTAL
W (Thompson et al., 1994), COMPONENT (Page, 1993),
fastDNAml (Olsen et al., 1994), Hennig86 (Farris, 1988),
MacClade (Maddison and Maddison, 1992), PAUP
(Swofford, 1993), PHYLIP (Felsenstein, 1993), the Ribo-
somal Database Project (Maidak et al., 1994), among
others. These programs use a variant of the nested
parentheses format for describing trees, variously referred
to as the 'Newick ' or 'New Hampshire' format. This
format has yet to be formally described and so is subject to
slightly varying interpretations. Details of how TreeView
interprets files produced by these different programs is
available in the program's documentation.
Availability
TreeView can be obtained from the World Wide Web site
http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/treeview.html.
The program is available in versions for both Motorola
68000 and PowerPC based Macintosh computers, and in
16 and 32 bit versions for MS Windows 3.1 and Windows
95/NT, respectively. The interface to the Macintosh and
Windows versions is essentially identical.
Acknowledgements
Mike Charleston motivated me to complete the program, and I thank those
users who reported bugs, made suggestions, and/or tested trial versions,
especially Ralph Bernstein, Fred Rkkson, Ed Rybicki (who provided the
tree shown in Fig. 1), Tosak Seelenan, and Korbinian Strimmer.
Division of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology, Institute of
Biomedicat and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow GI2 8QQ,
UK. E-mail: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk
© Oxford University Press 357
atPeriodicalsDeptonMay8,2014http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/Downloadedfrom

3. R.D.M.Page
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— BayMVGE
Fig. 1. A screen shot of TreeView running under Windows 3.1 showing four different ways of displaying the same tree.
References
Farris^l.S. (1988) Hennig86, version 1.5 Computer program and
documentation. Port Jefferson Station, New York.
FelsensteinJ. (1993) PHYL1P (Phytogeny Inference Package) version
3.5c. Distributed by the author. Dept. of Genetics, University of
Washington, Seattle, USA.
Maddison,W.P. and Maddison,D.R. (1992J MacClade. analysis of
phytogeny and character evolution. Version 3.0 Sinauer Associates,
Sunderland, Massachusetts
Maidak.B.L., Larsen.N., McCaughy.M.J., Overbeek,R., Olsen.G.J.,
Fogel.K., BlandyJ. and Woese,C.R. (1994) The Ribosomal Database
Project. Nucleic Acids Res., 22, 3485-3487.
Olsen.G.J., Matsuda.H., Hagstrom,R. and Overbeck,R. (1994)
FastDNAml: a tool for construction of phylogenetic trees of DNA
sequences using maximum likelihood. Comput. Appltc. Biosct., 10,
41-48.
Page,R.D.M. (1993) COMPONENT: tree comparison software for
Microsoft Windows, version 2.0. The Natural History Museum,
London.
Swofford.D.L. (1993) PAUP: Phylogenetic Analysis Using Parsimony,
version 3.1.1. Laboratory of Molecular Systematics, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington D.C.
Thompson.J.D., Higgins,D.G. and Gibson.T.J. (1994) CLUSTAL W:
improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment
through sequence weighting, position-specific gap penalties and weight
matrix choice. Nucleic Acids Res., 22, 4673-4680.
Received on May 28, 1996; revised and accepted on July 1, 1996
358
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