GENVO: GENE EVOLUTIONVISUALIZATION : A 3D reconciliation software for phylogenies

Abstract: Gene evolution is important in several areas, not least the understanding of thehuman body. Since the time of Darwin, researchers have visualized evolution withrooted binary trees. Hence, genes evolve constrained to how species have evolvedand that relationship is interesting to understand and explore. To solve this, onemethod is to infer the gene tree into the species tree, a so called reconciliation, butvisualizing reconciled trees with classical binary trees often results in clutteredvisualizations that quickly become difficult to understand. Therefore, in this thesisI present a new visualization method, Genvo, for reconciled phylogenies, and definea simple tree layout algorithm. I also present a problem characterization for thedomain-specific tasks, performed when working with gene evolution visualizations.A prototype of Genvo is then studied in a small pair analytics study, where fivepairs of master students tested the developed a prototype of Genvo. The results areanalyzed compared to a workshop with three participants, all with prior knowledgein the field of gene evolution. The analysis indicates a faster understanding of thegene data in Genvo, most likely through the pre-attentive features.