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  • Review Article
  • Published:

Visualization of omics data for systems biology

Abstract

High-throughput studies of biological systems are rapidly accumulating a wealth of 'omics'-scale data. Visualization is a key aspect of both the analysis and understanding of these data, and users now have many visualization methods and tools to choose from. The challenge is to create clear, meaningful and integrated visualizations that give biological insight, without being overwhelmed by the intrinsic complexity of the data. In this review, we discuss how visualization tools are being used to help interpret protein interaction, gene expression and metabolic profile data, and we highlight emerging new directions.

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Figure 1: Visualization of protein interaction networks.
Figure 2: Omics data overlaid onto biological networks.
Figure 3: Visualization tools for multivariate omics data
Figure 4: Visualization of metabolic pathways and profile data.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge S. Kühner for providing the data for Figure 1 and Â. Gonçalves for comments on parts of the manuscript. This work was partly supported by the European Union Framework Programme 6 grant 'TAMAHUD' (LSHC-CT-2007-037472).

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Correspondence to Seán I O'Donoghue.

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Gehlenborg, N., O'Donoghue, S., Baliga, N. et al. Visualization of omics data for systems biology. Nat Methods 7 (Suppl 3), S56–S68 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1436

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