BactoGeNIE: a large-scale comparative genome visualization for big displays. Issue 11 (December 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Aurisano, Jillian; Reda, Khairi; Johnson, Andrew; Marai, Elisabeta; Leigh, Jason
• Is Part Of: BMC bioinformatics. Volume 16:Issue 11(2015)
• Page Start: 1
• Page End: 14
• Publication Date: 2015-12
• Subjects: Comparative Genomics -- Large Displays -- Visualization; Bioinformatics -- Periodicals; Computational biology -- Periodicals; 570.285
• DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-16-S11-S6
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1471-2105

Abstract

Abstract Background The volume of complete bacterial genome sequence data available to comparative genomics researchers is rapidly increasing. However, visualizations in comparative genomics--which aim to enable analysis tasks across collections of genomes--suffer from visual scalability issues. While large, multi-tiled and high-resolution displays have the potential to address scalability issues, new approaches are needed to take advantage of such environments, in order to enable the effective visual analysis of large genomics datasets. Results In this paper, we present Bacterial Gene Neighborhood Investigation Environment, or BactoGeNIE, a novel and visually scalable design for comparative gene neighborhood analysis on large display environments. We evaluate BactoGeNIE through a case study on close to 700 draftEscherichia coli genomes, and present lessons learned from our design process. Conclusions BactoGeNIE accommodates comparative tasks over substantially larger collections of neighborhoods than existing tools and explicitly addresses visual scalability. Given current trends in data generation, scalable designs of this type may inform visualization design for large-scale comparative research problems in genomics.