In presenting my work on influenza evolution a couple weeks ago, Josephine Pemberton made the comment that the traditional presentation of the influenza phylogeny makes the process of evolution look overly deterministic; the successful trunk lineage is always highest up the page. Taking this to heart, I’ve made a revised phylogenetic plot that gives an interpretable y-axis showing the number of sequence differences between each node in the tree and the root sequence. This makes the rate of evolution through time obvious and more explicitly connects persistence with sequence evolution. Details of my procedure and the resulting trees for H3N2 influenza can be found here.