Ribbon: intuitive visualization for complex genomic variation.

Abstract

Ribbon is an alignment visualization tool that shows how alignments are positioned within both the reference and read contexts, giving an intuitive view that enables a better understanding of structural variants and the read evidence supporting them. Ribbon was born out of a need to curate complex structural variant calls and determine whether each was well supported by long-read evidence, and it uses the same intuitive visualization method to shed light on contig alignments from genome-to-genome comparisons. Ribbon is freely available online at http://genomeribbon.com/ and is open-source at https://github.com/marianattestad/ribbon. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.