= Menu

LayerCake: a tool for the visual comparison of viral deep sequencing data

Michael Correll, Adam Bailey, Alper Sarikaya, David O'Connor, Michael Gleicher
Bioinformatics, Volume 31, Number 21, page 3522--3528 — Nov 2015

Motivation: The advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS) has created unprecedented opportunities to examine viral populations within individual hosts, among infected individuals and over time. Comparing sequence variability across viral genomes allows for the construction of complex population structures, the analysis of which can yield powerful biological insights. However, the simultaneous display of sequence variation, coverage depth and quality scores across thousands of bases presents a unique visualization challenge that has not been fully met by current NGS analysis tools.

Results: Here, we present LayerCake, a self-contained visualization tool that allows for the rapid analysis of variation in viral NGS data. LayerCake enables the user to simultaneously visualize variations in multiple viral populations across entire genomes within a highly customizable framework, drawing attention to pertinent and interesting patterns of variation. We have successfully deployed LayerCake to assist with a variety of different genomics datasets.

Availability and implementation: Program downloads and detailed instructions are available at http://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/WP/layercake under a modified MIT license. LayerCake is a cross-platform tool written in the Processing framework for Java.

Contact: mcorrell@cs.wisc.edu

Images and movies

 

BibTex references

@Article{CBSOG15,
  author       = "Correll, Michael and Bailey, Adam and Sarikaya, Alper and O'Connor, David and Gleicher, Michael",
  title        = "LayerCake: a tool for the visual comparison of viral deep sequencing data",
  journal      = "Bioinformatics",
  number       = "21",
  volume       = "31",
  pages        = "3522--3528",
  month        = "Nov",
  year         = "2015",
  ee           = "http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/08/07/bioinformatics.btv407",
  doi          = "10.1093/bioinformatics/btv407",
  projecturl   = "http://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/WP/layercake/",
  url          = "http://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/Papers/2015/CBSOG15"
}
 

Other publications in the database