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James Hogan (Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia)
Bioinformatics is increasingly dominated by comparative investigations of coding and regulatory function across genome and species boundaries. Frequently such studies yield thousands of numeric similarity scores and candidate alignments, making discovery of subtle relationships all but impossible. Traditional, alignment oriented views plainly cannot scale to accommodate datasets of this magnitude. The Silvermap BLAST Explorer is an open source web-based tool for visualising the results of comparative studies in genomics and proteomics, showing the relationships between items of interest based on the distance between them - essentially the inverse of similarity - as though hits were cities on a map. Researchers may discover and explore relationships through the familiar visual metaphor of maps and navigation. At the centre of the map is a node representing the query sequence, with surrounding 'cities' indicating significant matches. By double clicking on a hit node, the map is seen to re-organise dynamically around this new query sequence, obtaining the necessary BLAST results via a web service, and allowing exploration of the ‘hit space’ for the set of query sequences.