Extending the visualization capabilities of a genome browser

Scalable visualization of big data is highly desired in several fields. A demonstrative example is annotated genetic data, where the DNA sequence can be better visualized using space-filling fractal curves. Though such approaches are already available in the literature, they are not applied routinely in the clinical practice. The reason of this undesired fact is that clinicians use well-established, but rather old gene browsers in their work. Naturally, these browsers lack state-of-the-art programming support and also visualization features. To help with this problem, in this paper, we propose a completion of a very widely used genome browser with scalable visualization techniques. The motivation of the work came from the clinical partner, since a good overview of the whole annotated DNA segment can lead to the recognition of currently unknown relations between genes. We explain what steps were needed to add the new visualization feature to the browser in terms of graphical elements, data extraction, and a scalable user interface.