General Information

IMAS (The Interactive Multigenomic Analysis System) is a new Visual Analytics system for the discovery of knowledge in genomic information. IMAS enables genomic scientists to rapidly analyze a set of microbial genomic sequences using tools such as Glimmer, Blast, ClustalW, Primer3 and TransTerm and to visualize the output of these tools in a unified genomic framework.

IMAS provides the user with a 1-dimensional zooming graphical interface to a genomic sequence. The user can interact with the sequence to analyze for the presence of coding regions, which can be further analyzed by sequence alignment with local and remote databases using Blast. Blast results are displayed in a unified graphical framework that allows the user to filter and to select Blast hits of interest.
Selected Blast hits can be then multialigned using ClustalW, and these multialignments are displayed using the common graphical framework.
Multialignments and pairwise alignments can be annotated by the user for future reference, and HTML reports can be generated showing these findings.

Current work on this project consists of extending the fluidity of graphical selection and filtering techniques, including the development of a more coherent graphical framework for presentation, query and selection. Work is also aimed at extending the suite of genomic tools supported by the IMAS framework, including better support for on-the-fly database creation and organization.

The IMAS Project is led by Dr. Chris Shaw (shaw at sfu dot ca)