Variant View Software
About
Variant View is a visualization tool for analyzing genetic sequence variants.
Variant View is useful to domain experts in several ways: First, it integrates diverse data types previously distributed across input files and external databases. Second, it provides summary metrics that are valuable for sorting genes and identifying candidates for further exploration. Third, it displays rich information about variant type and distribution across a gene. This information is not available in any other visualization tool and is valuable for interpreting the biological impact of variants, which requires human inspection.
Variant View was implemented using a combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the JavaScript library visualization toolkit D3 (Data Driven Documents).
Demo
You can try Variant View by navigating to the Variant View Demo Page. The sample variant data set for this demo is provided by Dr. Linda Chang and Dr. Gerben Duns. All patient ids have been sanitized. Any names that appear in the data set are made-up.
Instructions
Instructions for how to run and use Variant View are found in the READ_ME.txt file included in the software package.
Software Download
Variant View is available as Open Source. The variant_view.zip file contains all of Variant View's files in a compressed package. The individual files contained in the package are:
- VariantView.html - the Variant View source HTML implementation
- VariantView.js - the Variant View source JavaScript implementation
- legend.png - A legend for Variant View's visual encoding
- uniprotIDFTREFSEQ.dat - trimmed UniProt database dump for the human species; available at: http://www.uniprot.org/
- refSeq.csv - refSeq database dump for the human species; available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/refseq/
- demo_data_set.txt - a sanitized example variant data set
- READ_ME.txt - contains instructions for running and using Variant View
UPDATE November 2014: Variant View is now available for the mouse genome. The variant_view_mouse.zip file contains all of Variant View's files in a compressed package for mouse.
Publications
A publication and video for Variant View are available on the Variant View Paper Page.
Funding Credit
Funding generously provided by the Vancouver Institute for Visual Analytics (VIVA), MITACS, and AeroInfo/Boeing.