Baiacu: A tool for the visual analysis of the Saccharomyces Cerevisiae regulatory network

Abstract

The amount of biological data obtained by new high-throughput technologies is growing exponentially, leading to the identification of huge regulatory networks. In this context, the analysis and interpretation of the relationships in these networks are becoming major bottlenecks in computational biology. Although some tools are already available to process and analyze biological networks, several difficulties arise when dealing with large regulatory networks involving thousands of protein interactions. In this paper we propose a new interactive visualization tool, named Baiacu, to represent and analyze large gene transcription networks, based in principles of information visualization and in a graph drawing perspective. The tool is currently using the regulatory network for Saccharomyces cerevisiae as provided by YEASTRACT [14], with about 6 thousand genes and more than 42 thousand documented and potential regulations. As a case study, we analyze two transcription modules concerning the yeast response to heat stress. The developed tool is available at http://kdbio.inesc- id.pt/software/baiacu/ . © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.