Volume visualization of multiple alignment of large genomic DNA

Abstract

Genomes of hundreds of species have been sequenced to date, and many more are being sequenced. As more and more sequence data sets become available, and as the challenge of comparing these massive “billion basepair DNA sequences” becomes substantial, so does the need for more powerful tools supporting the exploration of these data sets. Similarity score data used to compare aligned DNA sequences is inherently one-dimensional. One-dimensional (1D) representations of these data sets do not effectively utilize screen real estate. As a result, tools using 1D representations are incapable of providing informatory overview for extremely large data sets. We present a technique to arrange 1D data in 3D space to allow us to apply state-of-the-art interactive volume visualization techniques for data exploration. We demonstrate our technique using multi-millions-basepair-long aligned DNA sequence data and compare it with traditional 1D line plots. The results show that our technique is superior in providing an overview of entire data sets. Our technique, coupled with 1D line plots, results in effective multi-resolution visualization of very large aligned sequence data sets.