MOBS - Multi-Omics Brush for Subgraph Visualisation

Abstract

One of the big opportunities in multi-omics analysis is the identification of interactions between molecular entities and their association with diseases. In analyzing and expressing these interactions in the search for new hypotheses, multi-omics data is often either translated into matrices containing pairwise correlations and distances, or visualized as node-link diagrams. A major problem when visualizing large networks however is the occurrence of hairball-like graphs, from which little to none information can be extracted. It is of interest to investigate subgroups of markers that are closely associated with each other, rather than just looking at the overload of all interactions. Hence, we propose MOBS (Multi-Omics Brush for Subgraph visualisation), a web-based visualisation interface that can provide both an overview and detailed views on the data. By means of a two dimensional brush on a heatmap that includes hierarchical clustering, relationships of interest can be extracted from a fully connected graph, to enable detailed analysis of the subgraph of interest.