Using phytools to plot different genera with different colors

A phytools user asks the following:

“I am following your blog. I have a phylogenetic tree. I would like to color the tree according to their genus name. Could you please help me, providing the code in R?”

There are in fact many ways to plot a tree with edges or clades in different colors. I'm going to give a demo using paintSubTree and plotSimmap in phytools as follows.

First, let's imagine the following species-level tree in which I have used the syntax Genus_species for all taxon labels.

library(phytools)
species.tree

## 
## Phylogenetic tree with 56 tips and 55 internal nodes.
## 
## Tip labels:
##  Rfom_nhijvq, Nvztxu_evipjo, Bswlbtch_azndgw, Ghsygvn_azkqlr, Qptbc_lwcqya, Qptbc_tpnozk, ...
## 
## Rooted; includes branch lengths.

plotTree(species.tree,ftype="i",fsize=0.7,color="black")

First, let's identify all the genera:

genera<-sapply(species.tree$tip.label,function(x) strsplit(x,"_")[[1]][1])
genera<-sort(unique(genera))
genera

##  [1] "Bswlbtch" "Dxfnqt"   "Fyoed"    "Gdzxskm"  "Ghsygvn"  "Nvztxu"  
##  [7] "Pxvolmfp" "Qpebj"    "Qptbc"    "Rfom"     "Sehvikuc" "Sfownt"  
## [13] "Uspvk"    "Uvybs"    "Wpuqdc"   "Wqbhd"

Next, find the MRCA of each genus. In the event that the genus contains only one member, we can just paint the terminal edge:

for(i in 1:length(genera)){
    ii<-grep(genera[i],species.tree$tip.label)
    ca<-if(length(ii)>1) 
        findMRCA(species.tree,species.tree$tip.label[ii]) else ii
    species.tree<-paintSubTree(species.tree,ca,state=as.character(i),
        anc.state="0",stem=TRUE)
}

The following is a trick to remove map segments of zero length:

tol<-max(nodeHeights(species.tree))*1e-12
species.tree$maps<-lapply(species.tree$maps, function(x,tol) 
    if(length(x)>1) x[-which(x<tol)] else x,tol=tol)

Now we can set our colors & plot them:

cols<-setNames(c("grey",rainbow(length(genera))),
    0:length(genera))
plot(species.tree,fsize=0.7,colors=cols,ftype="i",split.vertical=TRUE,
    lwd=3,xlim=c(-24,120))
par(font=3)
add.simmap.legend(colors=setNames(cols[2:length(cols)],genera),fsize=0.8,
    prompt=FALSE,x=-24,y=24)

That's basically the idea.

The tree for this example is obviously simulated. The following is the code that was used for simulation (taken from a previous post, here)::

library(phytools)
## first let's simulate our genus tree:
foo<-function() paste(sample(LETTERS,1),paste(sample(letters,
    round(runif(1,min=3,max=7))),collapse=""),sep="")
genera<-replicate(16,foo())
genus.tree<-pbtree(n=length(genera),tip.label=genera,scale=80)
genus.tree$edge.length[which(genus.tree$edge[,2]<=Ntip(genus.tree))]<-
    genus.tree$edge.length[which(genus.tree$edge[,2]<=Ntip(genus.tree))]+20
tips<-c()
for(i in 1:Ntip(genus.tree)){
    n.genus<-sample(1:6,1)
    if(n.genus>0) for(j in 1:n.genus) 
        tips<-c(tips,paste(genus.tree$tip.label[i],
        paste(sample(letters,6),collapse=""),sep="_"))
}
## add them:
species.tree<-genus.to.species.tree(genus.tree,tips)