I had fun putting together a figure this weekend for a proposal. This shows a phylogenetic analysis of partial 16S rRNA genes obtained from over 2400 bacterial isolates we have collected from Populus roots in the past several years. Also I discovered in the process a cool new online tool for making this tree called the “Interactive Tree of Life” (iTOL – http://itol.embl.de/). iTOL Seems to be pretty user friendly way to display a variety of different types of data on organisms in the context of their phylogeny! Shown here is categorical information around the outside of the tree about the origin of each isolate. However this program is able to display a variety of data types and formats, including continuous information in the form of bar charts and relative abundance data in the form of pie charts.