phynotate is a collection of {shiny} modules for interactive annotation of phylogeny plots. You can install it (to test) from GitHub using:

library(devtools)
install_github("teofiln/phynotate")

phynotate is partly motivated by TinselR written primarily by Jenna Hamlin from the CDC. Collaborating on some of the functionality of TinselR, it became clear that there is a lot more that we can do in terms of vizualizing and annotating phylogenies using {shiny}. So phynotate started as a general purpose package of modules that allows one to spin-up custom {shiny} apps that use ggtree and ggplot2 to display and annotate trees.

There are two main ways to use the modules, in an interactive R session or by ‘embedding’ in an existing {shiny} app.

In many cases we either obtain a phylogeny (or other tree-like structure that can be converted to an object of class phylo) by running some analysis in R, or we load a phylogeny created by another program into R for further analyses or visualization. Although there is certainly no reason why we couldn’t write ape, phytools, or ggtree code to create and save a custom plot of our tree, often, we just want to take a quick look, make some minor edits by clicking with a mouse and close the tree. This last part is a bit more difficult for a novice user of phylogeny plotting packages that is acustomed to an interface like FigTree or Dendroscope. phynotate attempts to fill this niche. To save a some time on making a decent figure through a GUI without writing the phylo object to file and leaving the R session.

An example workflow. We run some exciting analysis that results with 100 trees and we need to glimpse tree 54:

library(ape)

Trees <- replicate(n = 100, expr = rcoal(30), simplify = FALSE)
Trees[[54]]

# Phylogenetic tree with 30 tips and 29 internal nodes.
# 
# Tip labels:
#    t9, t8, t14, t5, t23, t27, ...
#
# Rooted; includes branch lengths.

Opening a {shiny} app within our browser with tree 54 is then as easy as:

library(phynotate)
make_phynotate(phylogeny = Trees[[54]], draw_modules = "LPTB", annotation_module = TRUE)

phynotate is entirely made up of {shiny} modules and their helpers (mostly not exported) or wrappers (like make_phynotate()). If you have an existing shiny app, where you would like to display a phylogeny and allow some modifications to it, perhaps even downloads, then calling the phynotate modules might be a good option.

For example (modified from the help of phynotate::main_server()):

library(shiny)
library(phynotate)

ui <- shiny::navbarPage(
  title = "A shiny app where we need to include a page for phylogeny viz",
  tabPanel(title = "Download sequences"),
  tabPanel(title = "Infer orthology"),
  tabPanel(
    title = "Vizualize and download trees",
    phynotate::main_ui(
      id = "id",
      draw_modules = "LPTB",
      anno_module = FALSE
    )
  )
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  # Server code to download sequences
  # Server code to infer orthology
  
  # Send a user selected tree to the phynotate viz module
  main_server(id = "id",
              phylogeny = input[["user_selected_tree"]],
              draw_modules = "LPTB")
}

shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)

This is a work in progress and there are many features yet to be implemented:

1. circular layouts

2. nodes

3. root

4. prune

5. name clade

6. color branches in clade

7. color tips in clade

8. scale bar

9. axis

10. map variable onto tip symbol

11. map variable onto tip color

12. map variable onto node symbol

13. map variable onto node color