VisNAB: An Interactive Toolkit for Visualizing and Exploring Genomic Data

• Activity Number: 335
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 2, 2011 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Graphics
• Author(s): Tengfei Yin*+ and Michael Lawrence and Nicholas Lewin-Koh and Heike Hofmann and Dianne Cook and Robert Gentleman
• Companies: Iowa State University and Genentech Research and Early Development and Genentech Inc. and Iowa State University and Iowa State University and Genentech Research and Early Development
• Keywords: interactive graphics ; next-generation sequencing ; genome visualization ; statistical cues ; massive data

Abstract

VisNAB (VisNAB is Not A Browser) is a package developed in R and is designed for plotting genomic data. It currently focuses on high-throughput sequencing data. In addition to genome views, VisNAB offers views of other attributes in the data.The genome can be viewed as a track, a Birds-Eye overview, or a circular view. Because it is written in R, it also provides analytical tools for guiding scientists to the information of interest, with all the strength of Bioconductor methods behind it. It is based on the QT library through the packages qtbase and qtpaint, so it's possible to examine huge amounts of data, and interact with the plots. This toolkit, along with other packages in Bioconductor, forms a high performance analytical pipeline for exploring genomic data.