DataViz: Visualizing Metabolic Pathways

Tools for visualization of biological data focus more on the algorithms behind data processing than on the needs of their biologist users. Scientists in the field of biology and bioinformatics require software that is more versatile, yet simple to use. This has become a necessity as the depth of information scientists have to organize becomes more and more complex. Disparities between the programs capabilities and their users’ needs lead to problems including difficulty in importing data, exporting data, and data manipulation. These problems are demonstrated by the inability for many bioinformatics tools to adapt to quickly changing user needsthis ranges from a wider aggregate of biological databases to more intuitive representations of biological data. We seek to focus on the latter, evaluating limitations in visualization software to better fit user needs. One such problem is the way metabolic flux is visualized in the widely used graph visualization program Cytoscape. We investigate different nodeedge representations using prototypes of varying edge shapes and colors to denote flux magnitude and direction. Our aim is to explore different methods of visualizing graph edges, providing an effective analysis for portraying graph data in a clear and concise manner.