Guiding the Interactive Exploration of Metabolic Pathway Interconnections

• Approaches to investigate biological processes have been of strong interest in the past few years and are thefocus of several research areas, especially Systems Biology. Biochemical networks as representations ofprocesses are very important for a comprehensive understanding of living beings. Drawings of these networksare often visually overloaded and do not scale. A common solution to deal with this complexity is to divide thecomplete network, for example, the metabolism, into a large set of single pathways that are hierarchicallystructured. If those pathways are visualized, this strategy generates additional navigation and explorationproblems as the user loses the context within the complete network.In this article, we present a general solution to this problem of visualizing interconnected pathways anddiscuss it in context of biochemical networks. Our new visualization approach supports the analyst in obtainingan overview to related pathways if they are working within a particular pathway of interest. By usingglyphs, brushing, and topological information of the related pathways, our interactive visualization is ableto intuitively guide the exploration and navigation process, and thus the analysis processes too. To deal withreal data and current networks, our tool has been implemented as a plugin for the VANTED system.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datavetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Sciences (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Bioinformatik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Bioinformatics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

network visualization

biochemical networks

navigation

glyphs

Computer science

Datavetenskap

Computer Science

Datavetenskap

Data- och informationsvetenskap

Computer and Information Sciences Computer Science

Informations- och programvisualisering

Information and software visualization

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)