Visual software tools for bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is the application of techniques from computer science, statistics and mathematics to problems in molecular biology. This interdisciplinary approach is rapidly revolutionizing biology. A survey of software tools for bioinformatics is presented. A special emphasis is placed on the visual aspects of these tools. The most important visualization tasks in bioinformatics are data sequence visualization and visualizing protein structures. The visualization of interactions between molecules in a metabolic pathway or network is an emerging area. Many important visualization techniques have yet to be applied in this application area. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.