BactoGeNIE: a large-scale comparative genome visualization for big displays

• Published in: BMC bioinformatics Vol. 16 Suppl 11; no. S11; p. S6
• Main Authors: Aurisano, Jillian, Reda, Khairi, Johnson, Andrew, Marai, Elisabeta G, Leigh, Jason
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England BioMed Central 13-08-2015
• Subjects: BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES; comparative Genomics; Computational Biology - methods; Computer Graphics; Escherichia coli - genetics; Escherichia coli Proteins - genetics; Genome, Bacterial; Genomics - methods; large displays; MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING; Software; visualization
• ISSN: 1471-2105; 1471-2105
• DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-16-S11-S6

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.
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 draft Escherichia coli genomes, and present lessons learned from our design process.
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.