Colouring Phage ITOL trees

Adding host and taxonomy data to phage phylogentetic trees

In  order to explore how new phage isolates are related to known phages, we often construct phylogenetic trees. We then try and interpret this in the context of known phage taxa and the hosts they infect. As we do this a lot we have tried to make the process as simple as possible.

To do this we always use the genome accession as unique identifier,  we can then link this to data in NCBI  on host, taxonomy etc that we pull out of Genbank each month (example here )

As we do this a lot Branko Rhitman (@Cyanoney) has made some ITOL templates so that these things can be quickly visualized. These might be of help to others so we have provided them here

  • Complete phage names can be added to Accession numbers quickly  -file here
  • Rings can be added with colours to identify different bacterial hosts – file here
  • Rings can be added with colours to identify different viral families –file here
Viral Families coloured in

Phage names and taxonomy with rings coloured in by host

Link to the ITOL tree that provides far better visualization here