Phylotree

A phylogenetic tree exploration tool, working on NCBI taxonomy data. Navigating the tree is augmented with Wikipedia data. Can you find homo sapiens? Spoiler: It's very hard.

Challenge

Have you ever caught yourself browsing Wikipedia and wondering: where does all this cool data on the right side come from? Say you're viewing the glasswing butterfly and you can see: genus: Greta, tribe: Ithomiini, family: Nymphalidae, class: Insecta, kingdom: Animalia. Wow! Who classifies all these species? How does that work? Where is the ground truth data for this? Those are the questions I asked myself. Then I got started.

Solution

It turns out that species classification is a complicated task within the broader field of phylogenetics. We owe our thanks to everyone working in this field for the naming, the cataloguing, and the publishing of species data within online databases. So I thought: wouldn't it be amazing if all this beautiful research data was easier to browse? Without signing up somewhere? Without downloading specialized viewer tools? Introducing: Phylotree

My role

Phylotree combined three areas of curiosity for me: phylogenetics, hiearchical data structures, and modern software development. I used Jupyter notebooks and Typescript for data processing, React, Typescript, Tailwind and IndexedDB for the frontend. Enjoy!