Novel visualization method for biological sequence similarity reports

Previously, we presented a system called Alignment Viewer that uses informa tion visualization techniques to visualize similarities between a single DN A sequence and a large database of other sequences [Chi et al., IEEE Visual ization '95 pp. 44-51, IEEE CS (1995); Chi et al.. IEEE Visualization '96, pp. 133-140 and 477, IEEE CS (1996)]. In this paper, we extend, summarize, and describe the system using several interesting case studies, We present our comb glyph technique for visualizing alignments between sequences. In t his paper, we also extend the original system by incorporating computationa l steering, and the visualization of differences between data sets. The cas e studies and the new extended system present our approach of extracting si gnificant relationships in the biological data set. (C) 2000 SPIE and IS&T. [S1017-9909(00)01204-6].