Overview

Evolution Highway is a collaborative project designed to provide a visual means for simultaneously comparing genomes of multiple amniote species. The tool removes the burden of manually aligning these maps and allows cognitive skills to be used toward something more valuable than preparation and transformation of data. Primary Researcher Dr. Harris A. Lewin explains that with Evolution Highway one is able to look ” . . . at the whole genome at once–multiple chromosomes across multiple species. The insights wouldn’t have come so quickly if we couldn’t throw the data at this tool from NCSA.”

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The Tool

Evolution Highway was developed to visualize the results of the mammalian genome comparative analysis. It started as a set of D2K components created to load, correlate and map chromosome and species data to a visual chromosome metaphor for comparative analysis. These were converted into Meandre components. It employs a zoomable user interface that allows the user to zoom in for detailed information and zoom out for an overview. The Meandre framework enables Evolution Highway to be a web service application. The web service application can be launched from the button located at the top right side of this page.

Evolution Highway offers several simple, user-oriented features that make examining the comparative maps easier. Users can look at multiple species at once, hide a given species with a click, zoom in and out of the comparative maps, which can cover millions of base pairs, define and save coordinates of the evolutionary breakpoint regions and regions of homologous synteny.