Global visualization and alignments of whole bacterial genomes

We present a novel visualization technique to align whole bacterial genomes with millions of nucleotides. Our basic design combines the descriptive power of pixel-based visualizations with the interpretative strength of digital image-processing filters. The innovative use of pixel enhancement techniques on pixel-based visualizations brings out the best of the recursive data patterns and further enhances the effectiveness of the visualization techniques. The result is a fast, versatile, and cost-effective analysis tool to reveal hidden structures that might lead to the discovery of functional identifications as well as phenotypic changes of whole bacterial genomes. Nine different whole bacterial genomes obtained from public genome banks are used to demonstrate our designs and prove their viability. Although the design of the new visualization technique is targeted at analyzing genomic sequences, we show with examples that it can be used to study other types of sequential data sets with a priori orders.