Genome Browse: Visual Analytics for DNA and RNA-Seq NGS Data for Diploid Organisms

With reference genomes now available for more and more species, next-generation sequencing is becoming highly utilized in the plant and animal world. Investigating these variants in their VCF format and the alignments in BAM format allows for detection of false-positives as well as aiding the interpretation process by providing a rich genomic context.

We introduce Golden Helix GenomeBrowse, a free visualization tool for DNA and RNA sequence alignment and variant calls along with annotations tracks from a rich catalog of pre-curated public data for a variety of species. GenomeBrowse was built from the ground up with the guiding principles of (1) working seamlessly with cloud-hosted data as fluidly and quickly as local files, (2) being intuitive to use for non-bioinformaticians studying both human and non-human species to utilize in their research, and (3) having a multi-threaded architecture to make big-data visualization and analysis accessible to anybody capable of navigating Google Earth. 

By including integration with a rich repository of public data, users have no barriers to the process of interpreting their sequencing results. Reference genomes currently in the GenomeBrowse repository include cow, dog, pig, hamster, rat, mouse, chicken, Zebrafish, goat, fruit fly, yeast, soy bean, rice, tomato, maize, and more.

GenomeBrowse can be used to highlight false-positive Single Nucleotide Variants and small Insertion/Deletions and aid in the interpretation of a variant’s impact for any diploid species with a reference genome.