Treemble: A Graphical Tool to Generate Newick Strings from Phylogenetic Tree Images

Abstract: Phylogenetic trees are ubiquitous and central to biology, but most published trees are available only as visual diagrams and not in the machine-readable newick format. There are thus thousands of published trees in the scientific literature that are unavailable for follow-up analyses, comparisons, supertree construction, etc. Experts can easily read such diagrams, but the manual construction of a newick string is prohibitively laborious. Previous attempts to semi-automate the reading of tree images relied on image processing techniques. These quickly encounter difficulties with typical published tree diagrams that contain various graphical elements that overlap the branches, such as error bars on internal nodes. Here we introduce Treemble, a user-friendly desktop application for generating newick strings from tree images. The user simply clicks to mark node locations, and Treemble algorithmically assembles the tree from the node coordinates alone. Tip nodes can be automatically detected and marked. Treemble also facilitates the automatic reading of tip name labels and can handle both rectangular and circular trees. Treemble is a native desktop application for both MacOS and Windows, and is freely available and fully documented at treemble.org.