Hi GTDB team,
First and foremost, thank you very much for your effort in developing and maintaining GTDB.
I would like to include the latest Tree of Life for a talk (best is to have branches collapsed at the phylum level). I could not find annotated archaeal and bacterial trees at the GTDB site. Perhaps it would be good to include, as they would be extremely useful in outreach talks.
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Hi maglau,
Thank you for the kind words!
We currently provide the archaeal and bacterial GTDB tree as Newick files in the Download section (e.g. ar53.tree). And we’ll follow up on your suggestion to provide the trees in additional formats in future releases.
For now, I can point you to the publicly shared iTOL project of the mealworm team (https://itol.embl.de/shared/mealworm) that includes both the archaeal and bacterial R207 tree, collapsed at the phylum level, and allows modifying and exporting the trees as png, pdf. etc. Just note, that this is not an official GTDB account.
Thank you Chris for the response.
We have downloaded the Newick files, and used iTOL to visualize them. First we encountered the problem of missing taxa, which was resolved by modifying the taxa names in the .tree files. We collapsed half-way through the archaeal tree, and it is intimidating to imagine working through the bacterial tree. We are thankful for your sharing of the iTOL trees.
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