Friday, December 14, 2007

pixels to Newick

Bioinformatics sports a new paper on an application called TreeSnatcher. The meat of the problem is essentially recognizing and converting a tree in a picture (pixels) to a representation in Newick format. While nifty I'm not sure this is particularly useful, and perhaps its a reflection of the lack of awareness of sites like TreeBase. Older trees are relatively small, and can be rebuilt using Mesquite or other programs. New trees should of course be archived somewhere so that they can be grabbed auto-magically, or, as my shadowy friends put it, "just ask the $%@* author for the trees". Fire up those screen-caps!

1 comment:

Andy Deans said...

TreeBase suffers from all kinds of problems. Will they ever update it? Will they ever make it useful as well as easy to contribute to? They still use frames and OS9 screencaps for the love of bejeezus. Hey treebase, 1997 called - they want their website back!