DiscoVista: interpretable visualizations of gene tree discordance

Abstract

Phylogenomics has ushered in an age of discordance. Analyses often reveal abundant discordances among phylogenies of different parts of genomes, as well as incongruences between species trees obtained using different methods or data partitions. Researchers are often left trying to make sense of such incongruences. Interpretive ways of measuring and visualizing discordance are needed, both among alternative species trees and gene trees, especially for specific focal branches of a tree. Here, we introduce DiscoVista, a publicly available tool that creates a suite of simple but interpretable visualizations. DiscoVista helps quantify the amount of discordance and some of its potential causes.