An interactive tool for visualization of relationships between gene expression profiles

Abstract

Background: Application of phenetic methods to gene expression analysis proved to be a successful approach. Visualizing the results in a 3-dimentional space may further enhance these techniques. Results: We designed and built TreeBuilder3D, an interactive viewer for visualizing the hierarchical relationships between expression profiles such as SAGE libraries or microarrays. The program allows loading expression data as plain text files and visualizing the relative differences of the analyzed datasets in 3-dimensional space using various distance metrics. Conclusion: TreeBuilder3D provides a simple interface and has a small size. Written in Java, TreeBuilder3D is a platform-independent, open source application, which may be useful in analysis of large-scale gene expression data. © 2006 Ruzanov and Jones; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.