PNNL

Abstract

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 the functional identifications and the phenotypic changes of whole bacterial genomes. Our experiments show that our visualization-based genome alignment technique outperforms other computational-based tools in processing time. They also show that our pictorial results are far superior to the hardcopy printouts generated by computation-based programs in studying the overall genomic structures. Six different bacterial genomes obtained from public genome banks are used to demonstrate our designs and measure their performances.