Interpreting the Omics 'era' Data

The analysis and the interpretation of the complex and dynamic biological systems has become a major bottleneck nowadays. The latest high-throughput "omics" approaches, such as genomics, proteomics and transcriptomics and the available data repositories hosting information concerning bioentities and their properties grow exponentially in size over time. Therefore, to better understand biological systems as a whole and at a higher level, visualization is a necessity as clear and meaningful views and intuitive layouts can give a better insight into coping with data complexity. The implementation of tools to maximize user friendliness, portability and provide intuitive views is a difficult task and still remains a hurdle to overcome. In this chapter, we present a variety of significant visualization tools as they specialize in different topics covering different areas of the broad biological spectrum varying from visualization of molecular structures to phylogenies, pathways, gene expression, networks, and next generation sequencing. We emphasize their functionality, the latest research findings, and insights into how these tools could be further developed both in terms of visualization but also in the direction of data integration and information sharing. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013