BLASTphylo: An Interactive Web Tool for Taxonomic and Phylogenetic Analysis of Prokaryotic Genes

Identifying a protein's function is crucial to reveal its role in the cellular complex. Computationally, the most common approach is to search for homologous proteins in a large database of proteins of known function using BLAST. One goal of such an analysis is the identification and visualization of the protein in the taxonomy of interest. Another goal is the reconstruction of the phylogenetic history of the protein. However, the BLAST result provides information about the occurrence of the protein in the taxonomy and its putative function mainly in a tabular format. This requires manual interventions and makes the taxonomic identification laborious. Although various tools exist to visualize and annotate large-scale trees, none of them intuitively and interactively visualizes the protein's occurrence in the taxonomy for different taxonomic ranks. To target this gap, we developed BLASTphylo, a web tool that combines BLAST with automatic taxonomic mapping and phylogenetic analysis and provides the results in interactive visualizations. We demonstrate the functionalities of BLASTphylo in two case studies.