QTL Based 3D Graphical Visualization Application

Nowadays, since the bioinformatics and genetic science are making rapid progresses, the Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) grows into a hot researching area. Meanwhile, after the rising period of visualization in 1980s, the development of visualization technology has been slowed down into bottle neck, and researchers try to find the breakthrough in its application area, especially in bioinformatics. Thus, the visualization application in QTL is a promising research direction.Here, an approach for generating interactive 3D graphic visualization of the genetic architectures of complex traits in multiple environments is described. 3D graphic visualization is utilized for making improvements on traditional plots in QTL mapping analysis. Interactive 3D graphic visualization for abstract expression of QTL, epistasis and their environmental interactions for experimental populations was develop in framework of user friendly software QTLNetwork. Creative definition of graphic meta system and computation of virtual coordinates are used to achieve explicit but meaningful visualization. Interactive 3D graphic visualization for QTL analysis provides geneticists and breeders a powerful and easy-use tool to analyze and publish their research results. The software QTLNetwork is freely available at http://ibi.zju.edu.cn/software/qtlnetwork.Our approach for QTL visualization still needs improvements in several aspects. The part of visualization for superior genotypes has not been concluded yet. Moreover, since this windows software is based on MFC, it isn't able to be run in all kinds of systems. We expect to solve all these problems in our future works.