Taxonium

Taxonium is a tool for exploring trees, including those with millions of nodes.

How do I..

visualise my own Newick phylogeny?

Upload a Newick file to Taxonium.org, and optionally a metadata file in CSV or TSV format. If using a metadata file the leftmost column must contain names of the nodes as in the tree.

explore the global SARS-CoV-2 phylogeny?

Visit Cov2Tree.org which uses Taxonium to allow you to explore a tree built by researchers at UCSC using public data contributed by researchers across the world to the INSDC databases.

build my own mutation-annotated tree to explore in Taxonium, or add my own metadata to an existing phylogeny?

Use UShER to build a mutation-annotated tree. Then use taxoniumtools to convert it to a Taxonium format you can upload to the interface at Taxonium.org

You can also use taxoniumtools to add your own metadata to the existing public phylogeny.

Find out more in 📚 the documentation.

load really huge trees?

For trees larger than about 6M tips, loading local trees in the browser at Taxonium.org can be unreliable on some systems due to browser memory limitations. To avoid these issues, use the Taxonium desktop app.

use Taxonium in my own web application?

Use the Taxonium component.

See Taxonium in action

Cov2Tree - (the repo that runs this is here)
Exploring the NCBI Taxonomy
Serratus (click Tree Viewer on any tree)

Citing Taxonium

Sanderson, T (2022). Taxonium, a web-based tool for exploring large phylogenetic trees. eLife, 11:e82392
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.82392

N.B. If you are citing the tree displayed at Cov2Tree.org, please cite the UCSC tree (.. and ideally Taxonium too if you relied on it for exploration)

There is a separate paper for the Treenome Browser feature (Kramer et al., Bioinformatics, 2022).

Structure

Taxonium is structured as a 'monorepo' containing a number of components:

taxoniumtools - a Python package that lets you easily generate Taxonium files from Usher protobuf files
taxonium_component - a React component that implements the Taxonium tree explorer
taxonium_website - The Taxonium website found at Taxonium.org, a wrapper around taxonium_component
taxonium_backend - a server-based backend that allows Taxonium trees to be explored without the user downloading the full tree (N.B. Taxonium can also be used without this backend, with static files acccessed in taxonium_website)
taxonium_data_handling - this is a node package upon which both the web client and the backend depend (it handles core logic common to both)