Re-rooting a tree along all edges

This morning I received the following message:

“I am trying to write a program that reroots a phylogenetic tree at every edge(branch) of the tree and saves each rerooted tree. I am using reroot under phytools. When I run for a single specified branch I am able to get a rerooted tree but when I run for all branches in a tree, I am getting… (Ed. an error).”

I'm not sure the user ran into difficulties, but the following is a simple function to re-root a tree along all edges that uses phytools::reroot internally:

reroot.all<-function(tree,unroot=TRUE){
    if(unroot) tree<-unroot(tree)
    if(is.null(tree$edge.length)){
        edge.lengths<-FALSE
        tree$edge.length<-rep(1,nrow(tree$edge))
    } else edge.lengths<-TRUE
    trees<-vector(mode="list",length=nrow(tree$edge))
    for(i in 1:nrow(tree$edge)){
        trees[[i]]<-reroot(tree,tree$edge[i,2],
            0.5*tree$edge.length[i])
        if(!edge.lengths) trees[[i]]$edge.length<-NULL
    }
    class(trees)<-"multiPhylo"
    trees
}

Let's try it:

library(phytools)

## Loading required package: ape

## Loading required package: maps

tree<-rtree(n=26,tip.label=LETTERS)
trees<-reroot.all(tree)
trees

## 49 phylogenetic trees

par(mfrow=c(7,7))
plotTree(trees,fsize=0.5,lwd=1)

It works!