SequenceJuxtaposer

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Fluid Navigation For Large-Scale Sequence Comparison In Context

James Slack
Kristian Hildebrand
Katherine St John

SequenceJuxtaposer is a flexible sequence visualization tool used to explore a set of sequences. It provides an immediate view of a set of sequences that a user can navigate through with a few clicks of a mouse.

SequenceJuxtaposer is a tool for the exploration and comparison of biomolecular sequences. We use an information visualization technique called "accordion drawing'' that guarantees three key properties: context, visibility, and frame rate. We provide context through the navigation metaphor of a rubber sheet that can be smoothly stretched to show more details in the areas of focus, while the surrounding regions of context are correspondingly shrunk. Landmarks, such as user specified motifs or differences between aligned base pairs across multiple sequences, are guaranteed to be visible even if located in the shrunken areas of context. Our graphics infrastructure for progressive rendering provides immediate responsiveness to user interaction by guaranteeing that we redraw the scene at a target frame rate. Our preprocessing algorithms are subquadratic: O(nk) for k sequences of n base pairs each. All runtime rendering algorithms are sublinear in nk: they are O(v) where v is the number of items visible onscreen at once, and v \ll nk. SequenceJuxtaposer supports interaction at 20 frames per second when browsing collections of several hundred sequences that comprise over 1.7 million total base pairs. 

Any FASTA file (DNA or RNA) can be loaded into SequenceJuxtaposer.

 

Release Date:
February, 2005
Status:
Availability:
Data type:
Techniques:
2D
Focus+Context
Software:
Installed
Technology:
Java
Platform:
Linux, Mac OSX, Windows
Requirements:
GL4Java

Project development

Institution: University of British Columbia