PentaPlot: a software tool for the illustration of genome mosaicism.
BACKGROUND
Dekapentagonal maps depict the phylogenetic relationships of five genomes in a visually appealing diagram and can be viewed as an alternative to a single evolutionary consensus tree. In particular, the generated maps focus attention on those gene families that significantly deviate from the consensus or plurality phylogeny. PentaPlot is a software tool that computes such dekapentagonal maps given an appropriate probability support matrix.


RESULTS
The visualization with dekapentagonal maps critically depends on the optimal layout of unrooted tree topologies representing different evolutionary relationships among five organisms along the vertices of the dekapentagon. This is a difficult optimization problem given the large number of possible layouts. At its core our tool utilizes a genetic algorithm with demes and a local search strategy to search for the optimal layout. The hybrid genetic algorithm performs satisfactorily even in those cases where the chosen genomes are so divergent that little phylogenetic information has survived in the individual gene families.


CONCLUSIONS
PentaPlot is being made publicly available as an open source project at http://pentaplot.sourceforge.net.
Hamel
Lutz
L
Department of Computer Science and Statistics, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI 02881, USA. hamel@cs.uri.edu
Zhaxybayeva
Olga
O
Gogarten
J Peter
JP
D000465:Algorithms; D019611:Archaeoglobus fulgidus / Q000235:genetics; D001407:Bacillus / Q000235:genetics; D001412:Bacillus subtilis / Q000235:genetics; D005075:Biological Evolution; D041883:Chlorobium / Q000235:genetics; D041861:Chloroflexus / Q000235:genetics; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003196:Computer Graphics; D003198:Computer Simulation; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D016678:Genome; D016680:Genome, Bacterial; D023281:Genomics; D008957:Models, Genetic; D010802:Phylogeny; D011381:Programming Languages; D016354:Rhodobacter capsulatus / Q000235:genetics; D012441:Saccharomyces cerevisiae / Q000235:genetics; D016415:Sequence Alignment; D012984:Software; D013045:Species Specificity; D048229:Sulfolobus solfataricus / Q000235:genetics