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Alberto I. Roca, Isabella Villano, Aaron C. Abajian (ProfileGrid.org, Irvine, CA, USA)
Clearly visualizing a large multiple sequence alignment (MSA) presents several challenges. The ProfileGrid idiom solves two issues: overviews vs details. A ProfileGrid's color-coded matrix of residue frequencies provides a simple overview of MSA conservation patterns. Also, our JProfileGrid software allows interactivity with each matrix cell for MSA-as-a-database lookups of sequence details. We contrast the benefits of ProfileGrids to the classical Sequence Logo idiom (www.biomedcentral.com/1753-6561/8/S2/S6) and also the new Sequence Bundles & Sequence Diversity Diagrams. They are ProfileGrid-like derivatives where every sequence is represented as a line trace through the matrix that can create hairball-like visual clutter for large MSAs. However, Bundles do permit tracking of a single sequence through the visualization identifying the residue order within the context of the MSA pattern. Thus, we report an updated version of JProfileGrid that incorporates this feature. Finally, we discuss the unexplored MSA visualization challenge of representing alignment substructure such as correlations (possible coevolution) between residue positions at non-adjacent MSA columns.