Comparing genomic sequences across related species is a fruitful source of biological insight. The first step in comparing genomic sequences is to align them — to map the letters of the sequences to each other. After an alignment is computed, visualization frameworks become essential to enable users to interact with the sequence and conservation data, especially in the context of longer DNA sequences or whole genomes. Visualization frameworks should be easy to understand by a biologist and provide insight into the mutations that a particular genomic locus has undergone.
The VISTA portal is a comprehensive comparative genomics resource that provides biomedical scientists with a single unified framework to generate and download multiple sequence alignments, visualize the results in the context of existing annotations and analyze comparative results in search for important sequence signals in alignments. The VISTA suite of programs has been in development and continued use since 2000. VISTA has popularized the visualization of the level of conservation in the format of a continuous curve based on the conservation in a sliding window. These concepts proved to be extremely successful due to the easy interpretation of the resulting plots.
