Table of Contents
MorphoBank provides a generally useful set of tools to assist you with your research. While no particular workflow is mandated, many MorphoBank projects tend to fall into one of the three categories, described in the following sections. Your work need not conform to these examples, but they should give you an idea of the types of project for which MorphoBank can be useful.
MorphoBank's most important innovation is the support of collaborative editing of phylogenetic matrices and associated data (taxa, characters and states, cells with or without images, bibliographic citations), thus it includes a full-featured browser-based matrix viewing and editing application. This, combined with its ability to integrate annotated media with matrix cells, characters and character states make MorphoBank a natural fit for projects developing matrices.
MorphoBank is able to import and consolidate existing matrices contained in NEXUS files. This means you can take existing datasets created in MacClade, Mesquite, NEXUS Data Editor, or any other NEXUS-capable application and bring them into MorphoBank for collaborative editing, addition of media and, ultimately, online publishing.
MorphoBank can also output matrices in NEXUS, allowing MorphoBank to be integrated into an analytical workflow that includes NEXUS consuming programs such as PAUP.