Phylo-VISTA: An Interactive Visualization Tool for Multiple DNA Sequence Alignments

We have developed Phylo-VISTA (Shah et al., 2003), an interactive software tool for analyzing multiple alignments by visualizing a similarity measure for DNA sequences of multiple species. The complexity of visual presentation is effectively organized using a framework based upon inter-species phylogenetic relationships. The phylogenetic organization supports rapid, user-guided inter-species comparison. To aid in navigation through large sequence datasets, Phylo-VISTA provides a user with the ability to select and view data at varying resolutions. The combination of multi-resolution data visualization and analysis, combined with the phylogenetic framework for inter-species comparison, produces a highly flexible and powerful tool for visual data analysis of multiple sequence alignments.