Help on Building Trees

• Add taxa
• Delete taxa
• Include unranked taxa
• Advanced features
• Disclaimer - Tree philosophy

Add taxa

You can build a tree for your own selection of organisms or taxa by either of following two methods.

1. You can directly type in the name of a taxon or organism you want to add to the tree into the 'Enter name or id' box. For example, type in 'Mus musculus' and click the 'Add' button and the browser will display the taxonomy page for the mouse.
2. You can upload list of NCBI taxonomy ids or organism names from a text file by clicking 'Choose File' button, selecting desired file from the dialog, and then clicking 'Add from file:' button.

Include unranked taxa

By default dispalyed Common Tree consists of only nodes with the following taxonomic ranks:

• superkingdom
• kingdom
• order
• class
• family
• genus
• species
• subspecies
• varietas
• forma

Advanced features

You can also use ENTREZ TAXONOMY to build a tree for user defined organisms.

1. Go to the ENTREZ TAXONOMY home page and enter the organisms you want to display in the following format: Escherichia coli OR Haemophilus influenzae OR Aquifex aeolicus OR Methanococcus jannaschii
2. Push the 'Search' button.
3. Select the 'Common Tree' format from the 'Display Settings' menu and click 'Apply'. Taxa can be added and removed from the resulting tree as described above.

Disclaimer - Tree philosophy

Any tree that you build with this tool is based on the classification in the NCBI taxonomy database, which is derived from a diverse array of phylogenetic resources. Because of this, please be aware that your trees may contain errors or inaccuracies. The tree display is a tool for exploring data but it cannot replace a careful phylogenetic analysis of molecular or morphological characters.