A Multiagent Framework to Integrate and Visualize Gene Expression Information

With rapidly growing amounts of genomic and expression data publicly available, efficient and automated analysis tools are increasingly important for biologists to derive knowledge for a large variety of organisms. Multiagent information gathering methods can be used to retrieve and integrate genomic and expression information from available databases or web sources to generate knowledge databases for organisms of interest. We present a novel, flexible and generalizable bioinformatics multiagent system, called BioMAS, which in this paper is used to gather and annotate genomic data from various databases and web sources and analyze the expression of gene products for a given organism. In this paper, we also present a new approach to visualize complex datasets representing gene expression and pathway models in hierarchical view space using the Starlight information visualization system (Starlight). This approach is an innovative application of using Starlight in the field of comparative genomics.