GenomeSnip: Fragmenting the Genomic Wheel to augment discovery in cancer research

Abstract. Cancer genomics research has greatly benefited from high-throughput technologies for the characterization of genomic alterations in patients. These voluminous genomics datasets when supplemented with the appropriate computational tools have led towards the identification of ‘oncogenes ’ and cancer pathways. However, if a researcher wishes to exploit the datasets in conjunction with this extracted knowledge his cog-nitive abilities need to be augmented through advanced visualizations. In this paper, we present GenomeSnip, a visual analytics platform, which facilitates the intuitive exploration of the human genome and displays the relationships between different genomic features. Knowledge, pertaining to the hierarchical categorization of the human genome, oncogenes and abstract, co-occurring relations, has been retrieved from multiple data sources and transformed a priori. We demonstrate how cancer experts could use this platform to interactively isolate genes or relations of inter-est and perform a comparative analysis on the 20.4 billion triples Linked Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) datasets