PangyPlot: multi-scale interactive visualization of pangenome variation graphs.

Mastromatteo, Scott; Chirmade, Shalvi; Roshandel, Delnaz; Thiruvahindrapuram, Bhooma; Wang, Zhuozhi; Patel, Rohan V; Sung, Wilson W L; Hajianpour, Amirhossein et al. · Bioinformatics · 2026

other · Level V

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Abstract

Pangenome variation graphs integrate multiple samples into a unified representation, mitigating the reference bias inherent to linear genomes. However, these graphs can be large and structurally complex. Existing visualization tools are each confined to a fixed scale of resolution, requiring researchers to switch between multiple tools to examine variation at different levels of detail. PangyPlot is an interactive pangenome browser designed for multi-scale exploration of reference variation graphs from full chromosome to nucleotide-level sequence segments. PangyPlot anchors navigation to linear reference coordinates, organizes variation into hierarchical bubble structures, and uses a force-directed layout engine for automatic node arrangement. An instance preloaded with data is available at https://pangyplot.research.sickkids.ca. Source code and documentation are openly available at https://github.com/strug-hub/pangyplot under the MIT License.