Reference-agnostic representation and visualization of pan-genomes

Abstract

Background: The pan-genome of a species is the union of the genes and non-coding sequences present in all individuals (cultivar, accessions, or strains) within that species. Results: Here we introduce PGV, a reference-agnostic representation of the pan-genome of a species based on the notion of consensus ordering. Our experimental results demonstrate that PGV enables an intuitive, effective and interactive visualization of a pan-genome by providing a genome browser that can elucidate complex structural genomic variations. Conclusions: The PGV software can be installed via conda or downloaded from https://github.com/ucrbioinfo/PGV. The companion PGV browser at http://pgv.cs.ucr.edu can be tested using example bed tracks available from the GitHub page.