Using Simulated Annealing to Declutter Genome Visualizations

AccuSyn is an interactive browser that visualizes conserved synteny relations (similar features) in genomes, giving biologists insights into the evolutionary history and functional relationships between genes. Even simple organisms have huge numbers of genomic features, and raw synteny plots present a daunting clutter of connections of which to make sense. Using a mixed initiative approach, AccuSyn integrates simulated annealing, a well-known metaheuristic for optimization problems, with human interventions to offer non-experts a way to automate decluttering, eliminating a tedious manual bottleneck in the discovery of syntenic information. AccuSyn has since been deployed online to a world user community