Tools needed to navigate landscape of the genome

Sir

I enjoyed your News Feature “The web-wide world” (Nature 439, 776–778; 2006), highlighting the impact of Google Earth on the scientific community. The success of this program underscores the importance of open standards for data and easy interoperation between information resources.

To some degree, the same success has been achieved in the macromolecular-structure world, where visualization tools allow users to ‘fly through’ macromolecules in 3D, and add layers of information to them. The first of these was Alywn Jones's Frodo (T. A. Jones J. Appl. Crystallogr. 11, 268–272; 1978), which inspired a generation of structural biologists. It was followed by a plethora of programs including O, Midas, Chime, Rasmol, VMD and PyMOL (see http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/history.htm). Many of these require only modest computing resources, and information such as mutation patterns can be easily superposed onto a structure of interest.

A good visualization program and open ‘browsing’ system can catalyse a lot of interesting science. I urge the development of comparable, free browsers for other emerging areas in the biological sciences: in particular, for visualizing the vast landscape of the genome and for navigating through complex biological networks.