A Cosmic View of Life on Earth : Visualizing the relationship between species DNA in a threedimensional space

Abstract: This master thesis project is interdisciplinary between the fields of biology, visualization, and astrophysics. The project was conducted at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in collaboration with researchers from Basel, Switzerland. The goal of the project was to, with the help of OpenSpace, visualize and map the relation- ship between animal species by looking closely at their DNA and commuting the informa- tion to the general public. First, Openspace and the software’s existing functionality were examined to visualize the datasets used during the project. The two datasets explored in OpenSpace were: a cloud-based dataset known as The Barcode of Life Data (BOLD) Sys- tem, which contains 1.1 million DNA barcodes, and a dataset containing differences in human DNA to track human emigration. This project is the first time Openspace has been used to visualize fields other than space. As a starting point, the group of primates from the BOLD dataset was visualized. With the help of researchers in Switzerland, the indi- vidual DNA barcodes in the datasets were converted into three-dimensional positions that represent the relationship between species. This was achieved by applying dimensional- ity reduction techniques. In addition, various features were added to the dataset during the project, such as lineage, mutations, consensus sequences, endangered species, human emigration, and measures of polymorphism within species. With the help of Openspace, different visualization techniques could be investigated to visualize the different features in the two datasets and combine these visualizations into a story. The result is a story that highlights information from the dataset. The relationships between species are visualized using colors, glyphs, and volumes. The story takes an audience on a journey from the closest human relatives to the whole group of primates. The results were evaluated through interviews with four people to determine how the visualizations were interpreted. Further development of the project is to add other animal species in the visualizations to compare with the primates in the three-dimensional information space. A future goal of the project is to create a show about the subject of biology at the Hayden Planetarium at the Natural History Museum, which today has shows about space.