Immersive Visualization for Genome Exploration and Analysis

Genomic and post-genomic data processing comprising genome sequencing, annotation and large scale genome technology produce increasing amounts of data which need to be analyzed. Visualization is a powerful analytical technique that uses the ability of the human brain to process complex data. Biological data were already explored by virtual-reality. Whereas the proteins are the subject of many works of modeling and visualization, still very little work has been done on the DNA. 3D graphical representation of DNA primary sequences allows complexity reduction while transforming 3D spatial representation into a numerical matrix to facilitate comparative studies of DNA. Two biological application were addressed in this paper that show the use of immersive visualization to help the users at genomic analysis phases. The first application is particularly concerned with the visualization of genes sharing similar expression factors within groups. The second one is focused on 3D shape modeling of exonintron elements within genes organization.