Bacterial gene neighborhood investigation environment: A large-scale genome visualization for big displays

Improvements in genome sequencing technology over the past decade have driven down sequencing costs faster than Moore's Law producing a genome sequencing boom [9]. Accelerated rates of complete genome sequence production are particularly evident in bacterial genomics, where small genome sizes enable rapid and inexpensive sequencing. These large volumes of complete genome sequences have given researchers a new approach to the longstanding challenge of identifying and characterizing novel bacterial genes: comparative gene neighborhood analysis. Due to unique properties in bacterial genome organization, researchers believe that it is possible to generate hypotheses around the function and pathway membership of novel genes by examining the neighborhood around gene orthologs, or genes with highly similar sequences. Visual approaches to this problem are necessary, since subtle patterns and relationships can be missed through automated approaches, but current comparative gene neighborhood visualizations are only designed to accomodate comparisons across 2–9 genomes in a single view ( [8, 4, 6, 5, 2, 7, 3]).