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Visualizing the position of many genes a time

Hi all,

I have a family of genes (over 400 seperate genes) and I want to visualize their position on genome/chromosomes. That means, to get a map of chromosomes indicating the position of each of these genes. Is there any software/online tool to do so?

Thank you very much, Panos

gene genome
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updated by bernatgel bernatgel • written by panagiotix • panagiotix

2 answers

If you can convert your data into GFF3-formatted elements, GenomeTools offers gt sketch that might help you out. Render into PDF and you can do markup with Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape.

You can also look into preparing a custom track on the UCSC Genome Browser.

Once you have added your custom track, you can use the Genome Graphs functionality to visualize it on chromosome ideographs (you can also visualize other signals with the same tool) and the View > PDF menu option to export a PDF file.

Browser shot

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written by Alex Reynolds Alex Reynolds

Thank a lot! That indeed helped me a lot.

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written by panagiotix • panagiotix

If you can use R you can use karyoploteR for this.

If your genes are in a bed file you can plot them with

library(karyoploteR)
library(regioneR)

genes <- toGRanges("genes.file.bed")

kp <- plotKaryotype(genome="hg19")
kpPlotRegions(kp, data=genes)

and you will get something like this

genome plot with 400 gene positioned on it

You can add additional data, the gene names for example, or customize the appearance however you want. You can find more details at the karyoploteR tutorial page.

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written by bernatgel bernatgel

Nice example — will put this in the bank!

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written by Alex Reynolds Alex Reynolds

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