Phylogenetic trees are essential for understanding the relationships among organisms or taxa. Many of the current techniques for searching phylogenetic repositories allow the user to perform a keyword-type search or an aligned sequence data search, or to browse a hierarchical list of taxa. Here we describe a new search engine that allows the user to present an example phylogeny, or a query tree, and then searches a phylogenetic database for trees that contain the query structure. The presented search engine is fully operational and is available on the World Wide Web.
['Huiyuan Shan', 'Katherine G. Herbert', 'William H. Piel', 'Dennis E. Shasha', 'Jason Tsong-li Wang']
A structure-based search engine for phylogenetic databases