PhyloGPU: A GPU-Enabled, Cross-Platform Phylogenetic Tree Viewer and Editor with Annotation Tracks and Vector Export

Source abstract

Phylogenetic trees are routinely inspected, rooted, annotated and illustrated in comparative genomics, molecular epidemiology and microbial ecology, yet existing tools force a trade-off between interactive desktop editing, layered metadata annotation, data privacy and reproducible figure generation. Here we present PhyloGPU, an open-source desktop application for viewing, editing and annotating phylogenetic trees. PhyloGPU reads Newick, NEXUS and PhyloXML files and displays them in rectangular, slanted, circular and unrooted layouts with continuous zoom. Trees can be edited interactively (re-rooting, midpoint and outgroup rooting, rotation, ladderizing, collapsing, pruning and renaming) and can be built from alignments or distance matrices by neighbor-joining or UPGMA. Tabular metadata are drawn as iTOL-style tracks (colour strips, heatmaps, bar charts and text) around circular trees or beside rectangular ones, entirely on the local machine. Screen, SVG and PDF output are all derived from a single renderer-independent scene description, so exported figures reproduce the on-screen view exactly, and a black-and-white theme produces print-ready monochrome figures. A command-line mode allows batch conversion. PhyloGPU is written in Rust with the egui toolkit, ships as a single self-contained binary, and runs on Linux, macOS and Windows. Core algorithms are covered by automated tests, and exported figures were verified with an independent PDF renderer. PhyloGPU is intended for exploratory analysis, teaching and figure preparation rather than as a replacement for maximum-likelihood or Bayesian inference. Source code, examples and documentation are freely available under the MIT licence at https://github.com/sablokg/phylogpu.