Background: New technologies are enabling the measurement of many types of genomic and epigenomic information at scales ranging from the atomic to nuclear. Much of this new data is increasingly structural in nature, and is often difficult to coordinate with other data sets. There is a legitimate need for integrating and visualizing these disparate data sets to reveal structural relationships not apparent when looking at these data in isolation. Results: We have applied object-oriented technology to develop a downloadable visualization tool, Genome3D, for integrating and displaying epigenomic data within a prescribed three-dimensional physical model of the human genome. In order to integrate and visualize large volume of data, novel statistical and mathematical approaches have been developed to reduce the size of the data. To our knowledge, this is the first such tool developed that can visualize human genome in three-dimension. We describe here the major features of Genome3D and discu...
Thomas M. Asbury, Matt Mitman, Jijun Tang, W. Jim