VISTA Region Viewer (RViewer) - a computational system for prioritizing genomic intervals for biomedical studies

SUMMARY Current genome browsers are designed for linear browsing of individual genomic regions, but the high-throughput nature of experiments aiming to elucidate the genetic component of human disease makes it very important to develop user-friendly tools for comparing several genomic regions in parallel and prioritizing them based on their functional content. We introduce VISTA Region Viewer (RViewer), an interactive online tool that allows for efficient screening and prioritization of regions of the human genome for follow-up studies. The tool takes as input genetic variation data from different biomedical studies, determines a number of various functional parameters for both coding and non-coding sequences in each region and allows for sorting and searching the results of the analysis in multiple ways. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION The tool is implemented as a web application and is freely accessible on the Web at http://rviewer.lbl.gov CONTACT [email protected]; [email protected].