SVGmap paper published in Bioinformatics

Few months ago, Xavi and Michi wrote a post titled SVGmap: Configurable image browser for experimental data, which described a new tool developed in our lab. SVGmap is useful to create browsers for individualized high-quality images which change the color of some regions according to some values. For example, let’s say that you have expression data for various cell types in a particular tissue (or for various tissues in Drosophila, as in the image), you can draw an SVG image of the tissue showing each of the cell types and provide a tabulated file with the expression data, after few steps you can have a browser that allows you to search for particular genes and display the SVG image with the colors corresponding to the expression of each gene for each cell type. You can see some examples in the SVGmap web.

We created SVGmap in response to a need that we had in a collaborative project with Ana Caño’s lab at the CSIC, who works on Arabidopsis, however we approached the development of the tool in a general way so that it can be used in many different scenarios with similar needs.

Now I am pleased to announce that the paper describing SVGmap has been published in Bioinformatics. You are invited to access the full paper following this link, I hope you like it.

Xavier Rafael-Palou is the software engineer in our lab who created SVGmap, and sadly today is his last day in our group. He has decided to take a very good opportunity offered to him to start a new project in a company more related to his expertise. I would like also to use this post to publicly thank him all the good work he has done during the almost two years he has been in our lab and wish him the best for his future career and life.