Researchers at EMBL-EBI and the University of Edinburgh have released a new version of BioLayout Express^3D, an open-source tool for visualising and analysing biological networks.

Network visualisation makes it easier to analyse and understand interactions between individuals, disease transmission, DNA sequence similarities, metabolic pathways, protein interactions, pathways, regulatory cascades and gene expression. BioLayout Express^3D is a visualisation tool tailored to biology: it helps researchers see clusters of data and explore very large network graphs in two- and three-dimensional space.

In this latest version, BioLayout Express3D includes a range of new features:

• Integration of the Fast Multipole Multilevel Method (FMMM) graph layout algorithm for enhanced visualisation of graphs;
• All plots now use JFreeChart enabling some customisation of plots including ability to display the mean, standard deviation, standard error or IQR;
• Data series can now be plotted as lines or histogram style;
• Options to filter by input value or coefficient of variation;
• Support for import of GML files.

BioLayout Express^3D is produced by the Enright Research Group at EMBL-EBI and the Freeman Research Group of the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh; more information about the team is available on the project website.

To learn more about BioLayout Express^3D, or to download version 3.1, visit www.biolayout.org

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