Visualizing genome synteny with xmatchview

Abstract

In genomics research, the visual representation of DNA sequences is of prime importance. When displayed with additional information, or tracks, showing the position of annotated genes, alignments of sequence of interest, etc., these displays facilitate our understanding of genome and gene structure, and become powerful tools to assess the relationship between various sequence data. They can be used for troubleshooting sequence assemblies, in-depth sequence analysis, and eventually find their way in publications and oral presentations as they often translate complex and abundant data succinctly, with esthetically pleas- ing images. Here, I introduce xmatchview and xmatchview-conifer, two python applications for comparing genomes visually and assessing their synteny. Availability: https://github.com/warrenlr/xmatchview