PNNL

Abstract

New high-throughput proteomic techniques generate data faster than biologist and bioinformaticists can analyze it. Yet, hidden within this massive and complex data are answers to basic questions about how cells function to support life or respond to disease. Now biologists can take a global or systems approach studying not one or two proteins at a time but whole proteomes comprising all the proteins in a cell. However, the tremendous size and complexity of the high-throughput experiment data make it difficult to process and interpret. Visualization provides powerful analysis capabilities for such enormous and complex data. In this paper, we introduce a novel interactive visualization, PQuad (Peptide Permutation and Protein Prediction), designed for the visual analysis of peptides (protein fragments) identified from high-throughput data. PQuad depicts the experiment peptides in the context of their parent protein and DNA, thereby integrating proteomic and genomic information. A wrapped line metaphor is applied across key resolutions of the data, from a compressed view of an entire chromosome to the actual nucleotide sequence. PQuad provides a difference visualization for comparing peptides from different experimental conditions. We describe the requirements for such a visual analysis tool, the design decisions, and the novel aspects of PQuad.