Biolayout Express3d: a community resource for the network visulisation and analysis of biological data and pathways

BioLayout Express3D is a powerful tool for the visualization and analysis of network graphs. Network-based approaches are becoming increasingly popular for the analysis of complex systems of interaction and high dimensional data. Networks can be produced from a wide variety of relationships between entities. In biology this includes the interactions between individuals, disease transmission, sequence similarity, metabolic pathways, protein interactions, pathways, regulatory cascades, gene expression, etc. BioLayout Express3D has been specifically designed for visualization, clustering, exploration and analysis of very large network graphs in two- and three-dimensional space derived primarily, but not exclusively, from biological data.

The last few years has seen a rapid increase in the amount of available data in biology as well as many other fields. Microarrays (miniaturised analysis platforms that can make 10’s of thousands of measurements on biological samples) and other high throughput genomics platforms are now being used routinely to generate ever larger and more complex datasets but many researchers struggle to gain insights from the data using existing approaches to analyse it. A new tool being developed by the experts at the University of Edinburgh and European Bioinformatics Institute, Cambridge is providing an innovative and eminently workable alternative to conventional analysis methods. They have created BioLayout Express3D, a powerful tool which is capable of supporting the visualisation and analysis of large network graphs derived from microarray and other complex data

Growing international user base