We’re looking for participants to try out our Sequence Bundles visualisation tool! Register your interest here.

Sequences are plotted as stacked lines against a horizontal X-axis which marks the sequence base, and against a vertical Y-axis on which residues are arranged on a scale of their physicochemical properties.

Over the past year, we’ve been working together with the Goldman research group at the European Bioinformatics Institute to design a new interactive tool for visualising, exploring and discovering sequence motifs using our Sequence Bundles visualisation method.

This is what we would like your support with. As well as making sure that the tool we are creating is functional and accessible, we are interested in its ability to enable exploration and the discovery of otherwise hidden motifs and features.

For this, we are currently looking for researchers and academics working in the field and using multiple sequence alignments who would be interested in testing our Sequence Bundles tool.

What can I use Sequence Bundles for?

The Sequence Bundles tool allows you to do two main things - visualise and communicate your data as a set of continuous lines and explore your dataset by manipulating this visualisation. The aim of these features is to help generate new insight or support hypothesis making.

Visualise and Communicate

Sequence Bundles is a sequence-oriented visualisation of multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) that allows for a holistic overview of sequential data. Some of its features include:

• visualisation that preserves the continuity of sequence data;
• residues organised on a meaningful Y-axis;
• parallel view of both Sequence Bundles and sequence alignments;
• display of residue conservation and consensus sequence.

The Sequence Bundles visualisation can be exported to vector or bitmap formats and included into presentations or articles.

Visualising sequence alignments and the consensus sequence using the Sequence Bundles tool.

Explore and Discover

The Sequence Bundles visualisation tool allows you to manipulate and explore your dataset by using a wide range of features. Using the Sequence Bundles tool you can:

• explore sequence motifs and correlations;
• group sequences and identify sites for grouping;
• arrange residues relative to a chosen reference sequence;
• organise residues based on physicochemical properties.

Exploration of sequence alignments using the grouping feature and arranging residues according to a chosen reference sequence.

Want to see your data as Sequence Bundles?

We’re planning to share the first version of the Sequence Bundles visualisation tool later on in the week as a close beta. If you’re interested in trying it out and helping us learn more about the types of discoveries it allows, register your interest here and we’ll be in touch shortly.

For more on the design process that led to the development of Sequence Bundles as well as the discoveries we made using the visualisation, read the paper we wrote for BMC Proceedings or check out our Sequence Bundles project page.

Hello and welcome to our new Science Practice blog!

We’ve been busy working on a lot of exciting projects over the past couple of months and we wanted to share them and some of the interesting things we’ve learned along the way with you. So, here are some of the things we’re currently working on.

Wrapping up Longitude

Science Practice was the lead research partner for the Longitude Prize 2014. We’re currently working on setting up a project page for Longitude so we can share some of the things we learned about designing challenge prizes and engaging with experts from the scientific community. We will also talk about our research approach, what worked and what didn’t.

Sequence Bundles visualisation and tool

Over the past couple of months we’ve been working together with the Goldman research group at the European Bioinformatics Institute to create a software tool for our Sequence Bundles visualisation method. We’re now close to launching the first iteration of this tool and start exploring how it can support researchers in discovering sequence motifs in their data. More to come as we venture out into conducting user studies.

Science Practice without borders

November is going to be a big month for us as we’ll be presenting at two international conferences. James G and Ana are off to the IEEE VIS 2014 conference in Paris where they will be talking about some of the best practices of visual design. Marek is heading to Mountain View, CA to participate in a workshop on extraterrestrial communication at the SETI Institute. But more about these in future posts.

That’s about it for now. You can find out a bit more about us and get in touch here.

Thanks for stopping by and hope to see you soon!

– The SP team