Genome Complexity BrowserΒΆ

Welcome to the Genome Complexity Browser (GCB) documentation.

GCB is created to analyse variability in hundreds of prokaryote or viral genomes simultaniously.

GCB performs:

  • Visualization of gene neighborhoods in a graph-based format.
  • Quantification of local genome variability.
_images/scheme_of_things.png

The graph-based visualization may facilitate answering questions:

  • Is a gene (operon) located in the same location in all genomes? If not, then what alternative genes are present?
  • Which parts of a gene set (operon) are conserved and which are variable?
  • Which genomes contain some particular combination of genes?

Local genome variability profile may be used to identify:

  • Hotspots of horizontal gene transfer or other local gene rearrangement events.
  • Cold spots, regions of the genome with virtually no changes in the considered set of genomes.

The GCB is available as a web server and as a standalone application. Web server contains precalculated data for 143 prokaryote species. Standalone version allows to analyze a custom set of genomes (basic command-line skills will be needed).

You can find screen recordings of GCB here (Youtube).

GCB paper is published in:

Manolov, A., Konanov, D., Fedorov, D., Osmolovsky, I., Vereshchagin, R., & Ilina, E. (2020). Genome Complexity Browser: Visualization and quantification of genome variability. PLOS Computational Biology, 16(10), e1008222. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008222