Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Genomes of hundreds of species have been sequenced to date and many more are being sequenced. As more and more sequence data sets become available, and as the challenge of comparing these massive "billion basepair DNA sequences" becomes substantial, so does the need for more powerful tools supporting the exploration of these data sets. Similarity score data used to compare aligned DNA sequences is inherently one-dimensional. One-dimensional (1D) representations of these data sets do not effectively utilize screen real estate. We present a technique to arrange 1D data in 3D space to allow us to apply state-of-the-art interactive volume visualization techniques for data exploration. We provide results for aligned DNA sequence data and compare it with traditional 1D line plots. Our technique, coupled with 1D line plots, results in effective multiresolution visualization of very large aligned sequence data sets.