gggenomes: effective and versatile visualizations for comparative genomics

TL;DR

gggenomes is a versatile R package that extends ggplot2 to facilitate effective, scalable, and interactive visualization of complex comparative genomics data, addressing limitations of existing tools.

Contribution

It introduces gggenomes, a new R package that enhances visualization capabilities for comparative genomics within the familiar ggplot2 framework.

Findings

Enables construction of complex comparative genomics plots.

Supports iterative data inspection at scale.

Integrates diverse datasets seamlessly.

Abstract

The effective visualization of genomic data is crucial for exploring and interpreting complex relationships within and across genes and genomes. Despite advances in developing dedicated bioinformatics software, common visualization tools often fail to efficiently integrate the diverse datasets produced in comparative genomics, lack intuitive interfaces to construct complex plots and are missing functionalities to inspect the underlying data iteratively and at scale. Here, we introduce gggenomes, a versatile R package designed to overcome these challenges by extending the widely used ggplot2 framework for comparative genomics. gggenomes is available from CRAN and GitHub, accompanied by detailed and user-friendly documentation (https://thackl.github.io/gggenomes).