Integrated Genome Browser: visual analytics platform for genomics

Abstract

MotivationGenome browsers that support fast navigation and interactive visual analytics can help scientists achieve deeper insight into large-scale genomic data sets more quickly, thus accelerating the discovery process. Toward this end, we developed Integrated Genome Browser (IGB), a highly configurable, interactive and fast open source desktop genome browser.\n\nResultsHere we describe multiple updates to IGB, including all-new capability to display and interact with data from high-throughput sequencing experiments. To demonstrate, we describe example visualizations and analyses of data sets from RNA-Seq, ChIP-Seq, and bisulfite sequencing experiments. Understanding results from genome-scale experiments requires viewing the data in the context of reference genome annotations and other related data sets. To facilitate this, we enhanced IGBs ability to consume data from diverse sources, including Galaxy, Distributed Annotation, and IGB-specific Quickload servers. To support future visualization needs as new genome-scale assays enter wide use, we transformed the IGB codebase into a modular, extensible platform for developers to create and deploy all-new visualizations of genomic data.\n\nAvailabilityIGB is open source and is freely available from http://bioviz.org/igb.\n\nContactaloraine@uncc.edu