Guiding the interactive exploration of metabolic pathway interconnections

Approaches to investigate biological processes have been of strong interest in the past few years and are the focus of several research areas, especially Systems Biology. Biochemical networks as representations of processes are very important for a comprehensive understanding of living beings. Drawings of these networks are often visually overloaded and do not scale. A common solution to deal with this complexity is to divide the complete network, for example, the metabolism, into a large set of single pathways that are hierarchically structured. If those pathways are visualized, this strategy generates additional navigation and exploration problems as the user loses the context within the complete network. In this article, we present a general solution to this problem of visualizing interconnected pathways and discuss it in context of biochemical networks. Our new visualization approach supports the analyst in obtaining an overview to related pathways if they are working within a particular pathway of interest. By using glyphs, brushing, and topological information of the related pathways, our interactive visualization is able to intuitively guide the exploration and navigation process, and thus the analysis processes too. To deal with real data and current networks, our tool has been implemented as a plugin for the VANTED system.