Bmc Bioinformatics
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High-throughput methods are generating biological data on a vast scale. In many instances, genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic data must be interpreted in the context of signaling and metabolic pathways to yield testable hypotheses. Since humans can interpret visual information rapidly, a means for interactive visual exploration that lets biologists interpret such data in a comprehensive and exploratory manner would be invaluable. However, humans have limited memory capacity. Current visualization tools have limited viewing and manipulation capabilities to address complex data analysis problems, and visual exploratory tools are needed to reduce the high mental workload imposed on biologists. ⋯ PathRings has been designed to accommodate interactive visual analysis of experimental data in the context of pathways defined by Reactome. Our new approach to interface design can effectively support comparative tasks over substantially larger collection than existing tools. The dynamic interaction among multi-view dataset visualization improves the data exploration. PathRings is available free at http://raven.anr.udel.edu/~sunliang/PathRings and the source code is hosted on Github: https://github.com/ivcl/PathRings .
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This Preface introduces the content of the BioMed Central journal Supplements related to BITS2014 meeting, held in Rome, Italy, from the 26th to the 28th of February, 2014.