A structure-based search engine for phylogenetic databases

Abstract

Phylogenetic trees are essential for understanding the relationships among organisms or taxa. Many of the current techniques for searching phylogenetic repositories allow the user to perform a keyword-type search or an aligned sequence data search, or to browse a hierarchical list of taxa. Here we describe a new search engine that allows the user to present an example phylogeny, or a query tree, and then searches a phylogenetic database for trees that contain the query structure. The presented search engine is fully operational and is available on the World Wide Web.