Interactive Visualization and Automatic Analysis of Metabolic Networks – A Project Idea

Visualization and analysis of metabolic networks is becoming increasingly important. Due to the tremendous research efforts in this area of Biochemistry, the level of detail in these networks is quickly increasing. Both, existing systems and systems under development concentrate on the static visualization of metabolic networks based on classical graph layout methods or simple ad-hoc methods. These approaches cannot match the current needs of the users due to the following reasons. On the one hand, the visualization cannot adequately react to changes in the network and can only rarely take user constraints into account. On the other hand, the size and complexity of these networks requires methods for focusing on details without loosing the context. In an interdisciplinary cooperation of three research groups with major competence in graph drawing, information visualization, and biochemistry, we wish to build a software tool for interactive visualization and analysis of metabolic networks that satisfies the needs of the dynamic nature of such networks and effectively supports the biochemical users within their daily analysis tasks. Various interaction possibilities as well as readable layouts will help the user to explore metabolic networks, to navigate within them, and to compare them. 1 General Information The project idea described is highly interdisciplinary. We plan to establish a cooperation between three different research groups: • Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria (information visualization and automatic graph drawing). • Institute of Computer Science at the University of Cologne, Germany (automatic graph drawing and discrete optimization). • Institute of Biochemistry at the University of Cologne and Cologne University Bioinformatics Center (CUBIC), Germany (biochemical background and evaluation). In the rest of this report, we give some information about the state of the art, some possible objectives, and a preliminary workplan, especially for the Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms in Vienna.