NetCompare: A visualization tool for network alignment on Galaxy

Network alignment has made great progress and provides new insights into protein function. To visualize the results effectively is difficult because of the large scale network. In this paper, a simple tool named Network Compare (NetCompare) is proposed to visualize and analyze the network alignment results. Firstly, multi-hierarchical clustering method is used to cluster the large aligned networks. Secondly, at each clustering level, users can select the layout method which they prefer to display the results. NetCompare offers both the global and the local views. The global views briefly regard one subnet as one “node”, and the local views display the details including node information. When users submit the matched nodes of aligned networks, the matched subnets can be described as well. Both the clustering and the drawing processes are parallelized on GPU which offers short response time in the analysis of very huge protein interaction networks. NetCompare is implemented on the local version of Galaxy platform.