Applied visual analytics in molecular, cellular, and microbiology

The current state of biological science is such that many sources of data are simply too large to be analyzed by hand. Furthermore, given the amazing breadth of investigation into the natural world, the potential for serious investigation from just mining heterogenous data sets is too rich to ignore. These two factors combined with the amount of computational power currently available make for ideal conditions from the perspective of visual analytics.;Here we describe three computational projects focused on the visualization and analysis of data within the fields of microbial pathogenesis, cell biology, and molecular conformational dynamics. ProkaryMetrics is a new software package providing 3D reconstruction of fluorescent micrographs as well as various visual and statistical tools for analysis of bacterial biofilms. The software FIND is a new platform for promoting computational analysis and enhanced visualization of multicolor flow cytometry data. FIND provides users with user-friendly, cross-platform analysis software, while simultaneously providing algorithm designers a target for implementation. Finally, the Moflow project represents a new visual representation of atomic flow within molecules during conformational changes over time in a more intuitive sense than was previously possible.