VisuaLife: Library for interactive visualization in rich web applications

KryÅ›, Justyna D; Gront, Dominik

MOTIVATION: Visualization is a powerful tool to analyze, understand and present big data. Computational biology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling require dedicated tools, tailored to very complex, highly multidimensional data. Over the recent years, numerous tools have been developed for online presentation, but new challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic require new libraries which will guarantee fast development of online tools for a better understanding of biomedical data/results. RESULTS: VisuaLife is a Python library that provides a new approach to visualization in a web browser. It offers 2D and 3D plotting capabilities as well as widgets designed to display the most common biological data types: nucleotide or protein sequences, 3D biomolecular structures and multiple sequence alignments. Components provided by the VisuaLife library can be assembled into a web application to create an analysis tool tailored to provide multi-dimensional analysis of a specific research problem. VisuaLife, to our best knowledge, is the most modern solution that allows one to implement such a client-side interactivity in Python. AVAILABILITY: The git repository of the library is hosted at BitBucket: https://bitbucket.org/dgront/visualife/. PyPI distribution is also provided for MacOS and Linux. While basic examples are provided in the supporting materials, the full documentation is available at ReadTheDocs website: https://visualife.readthedocs.io/