---
title: "Displaying mutliple trees"
---

Auspice has the ability to display two trees side-by-side, and to draw lines between tips with the same name (aka tanglegrams).
This is useful to compare the shape of different trees, especially when they are from the same organism -- for instance comparing phylogenies constructed from different
segments of the same influenza virus can tell you a lot about the different histories of the segments which have the capacity to reassort (see image below).

## How to load multiple trees

You can compare any two datasets which you have available -- for instance if you had "flu/seasonal/h3n2/ha/2y" and "flu/seasonal/h3n2/na/2y" then loading the URL "flu/seasonal/h3n2/ha/2y:flu/seasonal/h3n2/na/2y" would load them both.
A toggle is made available in the sidebar to turn off the lines drawn between tips.


![two-trees](assets/tangle.png)
*Comparing epitope mutations between HA and NA (worldwide influena H3N2).*
*Notice how the segments can differ drastically in how many epitope mutations they acquire!*
*While the crossing of the lines between the tips doesn't always prove reassortment, it's usually a good indication that reassortment is present.*


## Showing potential datasets in the sidebar
Depending on the way you've labelled your datasets, potential second trees are available in a sidebar dropdown.
These are defined by the [getAvailable API request](server/api.md#charon-getavailable).
Currently, the logic in `auspice view` is to match all datasets which:
- contain the same first "part" of the URL -- interpreted here to represent the same pathogen.
- have the same number of "parts" in the URL (parts are delimited by a `_` in the filename or a `/` in the URL).
- differ from the currently selected dataset by only 1 part.