https://bioalgorithms.ucsd.edu/research4.html

1. Heatmaps: Exploring Patterns in High-Dimensional Data

Heatmaps are a go-to visualization for representing high-dimensional datasets, such as gene expression or metabolomics data. They use color gradients to display data intensity, making patterns and clusters easily detectable.

• Applications: Gene expression analysis, pathway enrichment, methylation studies.

• Tools: Seaborn (Python), ComplexHeatmap (R), Morpheus (web-based).

Tip: Add dendrograms to visualize clustering of rows and columns for hierarchical relationships.

2. Volcano Plots: Highlighting Differential Features

Volcano plots are indispensable for identifying significantly differentially expressed genes or proteins. They plot the log2 fold change against –log10(p-value), making it easy to spot statistically significant changes.

• Applications: RNA-seq, proteomics, and metabolomics.

• Tools: ggplot2 (R), EnhancedVolcano (R), Plotly (Python).

Tip: Use color to highlight significant features and label key genes or proteins.

3. PCA Plots: Reducing Complexity with Principal Component Analysis

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) plots are used to reduce dimensionality and uncover trends or clusters in data. They provide insights into sample variability and grouping.

• Applications: Transcriptomics, metabolomics, microbiome studies.

• Tools: scikit-learn + Matplotlib (Python), prcomp (R), ClustVis (web-based).

Tip: Annotate clusters with metadata to enhance interpretability.

4. Manhattan Plots: Genome-Wide Association Studies

Manhattan plots visualize p-values across the genome, making it easy to identify significant associations in genome-wide studies. They resemble city skylines, with the highest peaks indicating loci of interest.

• Applications: GWAS, QTL mapping.

• Tools: qqman (R), Matplotlib (Python).

Tip: Use alternating colors for chromosomes and highlight significant SNPs for clarity.

5. Circular Plots (Circos): Visualizing Genomic Relationships

Circular plots are ideal for visualizing relationships across the genome, such as structural variations, gene duplications, or synteny.

• Applications: Comparative genomics, structural variation studies.

• Tools: Circos (standalone), Rcircos (R), pyCircos (Python).

Tip: Keep the plot clean and avoid overcrowding to maintain readability.

6. Sankey Diagrams: Tracking Data Flows

Sankey diagrams visualize flows or relationships between categories, often used to track changes in gene expression or pathway enrichment across conditions.

• Applications: Pathway analysis, gene set enrichment analysis.

• Tools: Plotly (Python), networkD3 (R).

Tip: Use gradients or distinct colors to highlight key transitions.

7. Network Graphs: Mapping Interactions

Network graphs represent relationships between entities, such as protein-protein interactions or gene regulatory networks. Nodes represent entities, and edges represent relationships.

• Applications: Systems biology, interactomics.

• Tools: Cytoscape (standalone), igraph (R), NetworkX (Python).

Tip: Use edge thickness or node size to represent interaction strength or centrality.

8. Violin Plots: Visualizing Data Distribution

Violin plots combine a boxplot with a density plot, showing the distribution and variability of data.

• Applications: Single-cell RNA-seq, quantitative trait analysis.

• Tools: Seaborn (Python), ggplot2 (R).

Tip: Split violins by groups for side-by-side comparisons.

9. Time-Series Plots: Monitoring Changes Over Time

Time-series plots display changes in variables across time points, useful for tracking gene expression dynamics or metabolic fluxes.

• Applications: Time-course experiments, cell cycle studies.

• Tools: Matplotlib (Python), ggplot2 (R).

Tip: Smooth the data to highlight trends while avoiding overfitting.

10. Genome Tracks: Visualizing Genomic Features

Genome tracks display multiple layers of genomic data, such as gene annotations, sequencing coverage, and epigenetic marks.

• Applications: ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, whole-genome sequencing.

• Tools: IGV (standalone), pyGenomeTracks (Python).

Tip: Stack related tracks for direct comparisons.

11. UpSet Plots: Visualizing Set Intersections

UpSet plots are a powerful alternative to Venn diagrams for visualizing intersections between multiple datasets.

• Applications: Overlap analysis for gene sets, pathways, or variants.

• Tools: UpSetR (R), ComplexUpset (Python).

Tip: Use bar plots to represent the size of each intersection for added clarity.

12. Ridge Plots: Comparing Distributions

Ridge plots visualize the distributions of multiple datasets, stacked for easy comparison.

• Applications: Transcriptomics, single-cell RNA-seq.

• Tools: ggridges (R), Matplotlib (Python).

Tip: Use transparency and consistent scaling for better readability.

13. Chord Diagrams: Visualizing Connections Between Groups

Chord diagrams illustrate relationships between categories, such as shared genes between pathways or overlaps in regulatory elements.

• Applications: Pathway overlap, synteny, co-expression networks.

• Tools: Circlize (R), Holoviews (Python).

Tip: Use distinct colors for each group to emphasize relationships.

14. Treemaps: Hierarchical Data Representation

Treemaps visualize hierarchical data as nested rectangles, with area proportional to data size.

• Applications: Ontology enrichment, pathway analysis.

• Tools: Treemapify (R), Plotly (Python).

Tip: Use colors to represent additional variables, like significance or enrichment scores.

15. T-SNE/UMAP Plots: Dimensionality Reduction for Clustering

T-SNE and UMAP plots are great for visualizing high-dimensional data in two dimensions while preserving local or global structure.

• Applications: Single-cell transcriptomics, clustering analyses.

• Tools: scikit-learn (Python), Seurat (R).

Tip: Combine with metadata annotations for better cluster interpretation.

Bringing It All Together

The choice of visualization can significantly impact the insights gained from bioinformatics data. By selecting plots tailored to your data type and analysis goals, you can effectively communicate your findings and make your research more impactful. Whether you’re a seasoned bioinformatician or a beginner, mastering these visualizations will elevate your analyses and presentations.

Pine Biotech, Inc., a US-based startup working with the Tauber Bioinformatics Research Center is offering a full curriculum online preparing students without any technical background for real-life challenges with large scale biomedical data. Workshops on processing, analysis and biomedical interpretation of Next Generation Sequencing data cover important up-to-date algorithms and machine learning approaches. The most important thing is that there are virtually no pre-requisites such as coding, biostatistics or advanced medical skills. If you know what gene is and how the genes are expressed, you are ready to take the courses or join our workshops. Learn more: https://edu.t-bio.info/workshops/

Recently useR! conference have been organized University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain.

http://www.edii.uclm.es/~useR-2013//

First cover a full workflow from preparation, reads counting, data preprocessing, gene set test, to pathway visualization in about 40 lines of codes. The same workflow can be used for GO analysis or other types of gene set analysis too. We also describe joint workflows, i.e. to do gene-level analysis using one of the major RNA-Seq analysis tools, DEseq/DEseq2, edgeR, limma and Cufflinks, and feed the results into GAGE/Pahview for pathway analysis or visualization. All these workflows are implemented in R/Bioconductor.

The work ows cover the most common situations and issues for RNA-Seq data pathway analysis. Issues like data quality assessment are relevant for data analysis in general yet out the scope of this tutorial. Although we focus on RNA-Seq data here, but pathway analysis work ow remains similar for microarray, particularly step 3-4 would be the same. Please check gage and pathview vigenttes for details.

Note: You need to update to current release versions of R(3.0.2)/ Bioconductor(2.13) to use all the features. 

Reference: 

Please check it out:
http://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/gage.html
http://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/vignettes/gage/inst/doc/RNA-seqWorkflow.pdf

https://flowingdata.com/

Address of the bookmark: https://flowingdata.com/

These examples are taken from the googleVis demo. You can execute the demo via

library(googleVis)
demo(googleVis)

For more details about the charts and further examples see the helpfiles of the individual googleVis function and review the Google Charts API documentation and Terms of Service.

Address of the bookmark: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/googleVis/vignettes/googleVis_examples.html

Since you can create Power BI custom visuals using R, that means you'll be able to design a custom R-based chart, and make it available to people using Excel — even if they don't know how to use R themselves. There also many pre-defined custom visuals available, including some familiar R charts like decision trees, calendar heatmaps, and hexbin scatterplots.

For more details on how you'll be able to use custom R visuals in Excel, check out the blog post linked below.

PowerBI Blog: Excel announces new data visualization capabilities with Power BI custom visuals

1. greatly improve resolution of the visualization fron n to √nn;
2. easy to visualize clusters because generally data points in the axis will also be close in the 2D space.

This package aims to provide an easy and flexible way to visualize data through Hilbert curve. The implementation and example figures are based on following sources:

• http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/hilbert/
• http://corte.si/posts/code/hilbert/portrait/index.html
• http://bioconductor.org/packages/devel/bioc/html/HilbertVis.html

Address of the bookmark: https://bioconductor.org/packages/devel/bioc/vignettes/HilbertCurve/inst/doc/HilbertCurve.html