Rclade: Automated Deep-Time Phylogenetic Tree Collapsing and Visualization

Provides a single-function pipeline for automated collapsing and visualization of large phylogenetic trees with geological timescales. Automatically parses taxonomic labels from multiple formats (GTDB, Silva, NCBI, embedded, custom), identifies Most Recent Common Ancestors (MRCAs), assigns color-blind-safe palettes, executes batch collapsing with automatic nesting-aware ordering, integrates 'deeptime' geologic time scales with adaptive time breaks and unit switching, and manages smart legend layout. Supports special ancestral node identifiers (LUCA, LACA, LBCA) for highlighting key nodes in the tree of life. Provides external taxonomy file support for trees with incomplete or missing taxonomic labels. Features real-time logging with timestamps, step tracking, and multiple log levels. Includes comprehensive input validation for tree and sequence file formats. Reduces a 60-line manual workflow to a single function call while preserving full compatibility with the 'ggtree'/'deeptime' ecosystem. The visualization pipeline builds on 'ggtree' Yu et al. (2017) <doi:10.1111/2041-210X.12628>, 'deeptime' Gearty (2025) <doi:10.1080/20964471.2025.2537516>, and 'ape' Paradis and Schliep (2019) <doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bty633>.

Version: 1.1.5
Depends: R (≥ 4.1.0)
Imports: ape (≥ 5.0), ggtree (≥ 4.0.0), deeptime (≥ 1.0), ggplot2 (≥ 3.5.0), rlang, stringr (≥ 1.5), tidytree (≥ 0.4), viridisLite
Suggests: treeio (≥ 1.0), phangorn (≥ 2.0), RColorBrewer, cowplot (≥ 1.1), patchwork (≥ 1.1), shiny (≥ 1.7), optparse (≥ 1.7), yaml, vdiffr (≥ 1.0), testthat (≥ 3.0), knitr, rmarkdown, covr, filelock, withr
Published: 2026-09-26
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.Rclade (may not be active yet)
Author: Zeng Zichao [aut, cre]
Maintainer: Zeng Zichao <zengzichao at sjtu.edu.cn>
BugReports: https://github.com/zengzichao/Rclade/issues
License: MIT + file LICENSE
URL: https://github.com/zengzichao/Rclade, https://zengzichao.github.io/Rclade/
NeedsCompilation: no
Citation: Rclade citation info
Materials: README, NEWS
CRAN checks: Rclade results

Documentation:

Reference manual: Rclade.html , Rclade.pdf
Vignettes: Publication-Ready Output (source, R code)
Quick Start: From Tree File to Publication Figure (source, R code)
Supported Taxonomy Label Formats (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: Rclade_1.1.5.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: not available, r-release: not available, r-oldrel: not available
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): not available, r-oldrel (arm64): not available, r-release (x86_64): not available, r-oldrel (x86_64): not available

Linking:

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