Power of Round

Circular data tracks naturally support display of information at various resolutions.

Compared to a track at a radius r, a pixel in a track at r/4 will span a region 4x larger. Tracks in the interior of the figure are therefore useful to display low-resolution or summary information.

// gene-density

NYT Article - Mapping the Epigenome

In collaboration with Jonathan Corum from the NYT, Martin Krzywinski created an illustration of data showing methylation on chromosome 22 in a variety of tissues.

The illustration accompanies the article Now: The Rest of the Genome, by Carl Zimmer.

// nyt

Circos Maps Cancer Landscapes

Nature features an article by Heidi Ledford, The Cancer Genome Challenge, which discusses the progress and challenges of identifying structural variation signatures in cancer genomes.

Circos images are used throughout the piece, taken from the COSMIC project (Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer).

6Ledford H 2010 Big science: The cancer genome challenge Nature 464 (7291) 972-974.

// cancer-genome-challenge

Circos Introduced in the New York Times

My first Circos infographic to be published in the New York Times introduces the idea of sequence similarity curves linking circularly composed ideograms.

Working with David Constantine, I illustrated the similarity between chromosome 1 of mouse, rhesus, chimp, and chicken to that of human.

One of the smaller panels in the infographic was subsequently used by the Alliance of Lupus Research in their Faces of Lupus II video.

// nyt-species