genomeview - an extensible python-based genomics visualization engine

Abstract

Visual inspection and analysis is integral to quality control, hypothesis generation, methods development and validation of genomic data. The richness and complexity of genomic data necessitates customized visualizations highlighting specific features of interest while hiding the often vast tide of irrelevant attributes. However, the majority of genome-visualization occurs either in general-purpose tools such as IGV (Robinson et al, 2011) or the UCSC Genome Browser (Kent et al, 2002) - which offer many options to adjust visualization parameters, but very little in the way of extensibility - or narrowly-focused tools aiming to solve a single visualization problem. Here, we present genomeview, a python-based visualization engine which is easy to extend and simple to integrate into existing analysis pipelines.