LucidDraw: Efficiently visualizing complex biochemical networks within MATLAB

Background: Biochemical networks play an essential role in systems biology. Rapidly growing network data and e research activities call for convenient visualization tools to aid intuitively perceiving abstract structures of networks and gaining insights into the functional implications of networks. There are various kinds of network visualization software, but they are usually not adequate for visual analysis of complex biological networks mainly because of the two reasons: 1) most existing drawing methods suitable for biochemical networks have high computation loads and can hardly achieve near real-time visualization; 2) available network visualization tools are designed for working in certain network modeling platforms, so they are not convenient for general analyses due to lack of broader range of readily accessible numerical utilities. Results: We present LucidDraw as a visual analysis tool, which features (a) speed: typical biological networks with several hundreds of nodes can b...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Sheng He, Juan Mei, Guiyang Shi, Zhengxiang Wang, Weijiang Li
• Keywords: Biochemical Networks, Biological Networks, BMCBI 2010, Visualization Tools