InterViewer: Dynamic visualization of protein-protein interactions

Abstract

From the perspective of graph drawing, a protein interaction network is challenging because it is a complicated, nonplanar graph with a large number of edge crossings and because it is a disconnected graph consisting of many connected components with nodes of a wide range of degrees. Inter Viewer is a system for drawing and exploring protein-protein interaction networks in three-dimensional space. Unique features of Inter Viewer: (1) it is much faster than other recent implementations of drawing algorithms; (2) it can be used not only for drawing protein interaction networks but also for simplifying them into different types of networks; and (3) it provides an integrated framework for querying protein interaction databases and directly visualizing the query results. This work was supported by the advanced backbone IT technology development program of the Ministry of Information and Communication of Korea under grant number IMT2000-C3-4.