An Approach to Minimize Crossings in Phylogenetic Trees

Visualization of phylogenetic trees became popular and has been widely used in biology, taxonomy, cloud computing, and bioinformatics. Different phylogenetic trees can be built based on different measures and methods. As a result, the problem became obvious when deciding which tree is better and most visually appealing. This often involves comparing two phylogenetic trees to each other. The main goal of this paper is to display a pair of alternative phylogenetic trees together while minimizing the number of crossings among the branches of both trees. This paper summarizes different tools and techniques used in visualizing phylogenetic trees in different studies and describes their limitations. After surveying different studies involved in crossings minimization, a naive algorithm to minimize the number of crossings is proposed.