Sungear: interactive visualization and functional analysis of genomic datasets

• Published in: Bioinformatics Vol. 23; no. 2; pp. 259 - 261
• Main Authors: Poultney, Christopher S., Gutiérrez, Rodrigo A., Katari, Manpreet S., Gifford, Miriam L., Paley, W. Bradford, Coruzzi, Gloria M., Shasha, Dennis E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Oxford University Press 15-01-2007; Oxford Publishing Limited (England)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Biological and medical sciences; Chromosome Mapping - methods; Computer Graphics; Database Management Systems; Databases, Genetic; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; General aspects; Genetics, Population; Information Storage and Retrieval - methods; Mathematics in biology. Statistical analysis. Models. Metrology. Data processing in biology (general aspects); Software; User-Computer Interface; Visualization; Ontology; Genomics; DNA chip; Functional analysis; Scope note; Graphical interface; Polygon; Web site; Bioinformatics; Acyclic graph; Comparative study; Directed graph
• ISSN: 1367-4803; 1460-2059; 1367-4811
• DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btl496

Sungear is a software system that supports a rapid, visually interactive and biologist-driven comparison of large datasets. The datasets can come from microarray experiments (e.g. genes induced in each experiment), from comparative genomics (e.g. genes present in each genome) or even from non-biological applications (e.g. demographics or baseball statistics). Sungear represents multiple datasets as vertices in a polygon. Each possible intersection among the sets is represented as a circle inside the polygon. The position of the circle is determined by the position of the vertices represented in the intersection and the area of the circle is determined by the number of elements in the intersection. Sungear shows which Gene Ontology terms are over-represented in a subset of circles or anchors. The intuitive Sungear interface has enabled biologists to determine quickly which dataset or groups of datasets play a role in a biological function of interest. Availability: A live online version of Sungear can be found at Contact:[e-mail] Supplementary information: Submitted—link TBD.