title: Integrative visual analysis of protein sequence mutations.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  An important aspect of studying the relationship between protein sequence, structure and function is the molecular characterization of the effect of protein mutations. To understand the functional impact of amino acid changes, the multiple biological properties of protein residues have to be considered together.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Here, we present a novel visual approach for analyzing residue mutations. It combines different biological visualizations and integrates them with molecular data derived from external resources. To show various aspects of the biological information on different scales, our approach includes one-dimensional sequence views, three-dimensional protein structure views and two-dimensional views of residue interaction networks as well as aggregated views. The views are linked tightly and synchronized to reduce the cognitive load of the user when switching between them. In particular, the protein mutations are mapped onto the views together with further functional and structural information. We also assess the impact of individual amino acid changes by the detailed analysis and visualization of the involved residue interactions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and the developed software on the data provided for the BioVis 2013 data contest.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our visual approach and software greatly facilitate the integrative and interactive analysis of protein mutations based on complementary visualizations. The different data views offered to the user are enriched with information about molecular properties of amino acid residues and further biological knowledge.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Informatics, 66123 Saarbücken, Germany ; University of California, San Francisco, 94143-2240 San Francisco, USA.
authors.forename: Nadezhda T
authors.initials: NT
authors.lastname: Doncheva
authors.affiliation: The University of Sydney, 2006 Sydney, Australia.
authors.forename: Karsten
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Klein
authors.affiliation: University of California, San Francisco, 94143-2240 San Francisco, USA.
authors.forename: John H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Morris
authors.affiliation: Monash University, 3145 Melbourne, Australia.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Wybrow
authors.affiliation: EURAC research, 39100 Bolzano, Italy.
authors.forename: Francisco S
authors.initials: FS
authors.lastname: Domingues
authors.affiliation: University Medicine Greifswald, 17475 Greifswald, Germany ; Graz University of Technology, 8010 Graz, Austria ; BioTechMed-Graz, 8010 Graz, Austria.
authors.forename: Mario
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Albrecht