Director

Director visualizes molecular regulatory cascades and potential downstream effects to support interpretation of genomic and gene expression data.

Key Features:

• Visualization: Implements Sankey-like diagrams to represent relationships and potential downstream effects among regulatory and co-expressed molecules.
• Rendering stack: Uses the R package htmltools together with a modified Sankey plugin from the JavaScript library D3 (D3.js) to produce visual representations and HTML output.
• Bioconductor integration: Distributed as an R/Bioconductor package to enable interoperability with other Bioconductor packages and R-based genomic analysis workflows.

Scientific Applications:

• Identifying downstream effects: Visualizes molecular interactions to highlight potential downstream consequences of specific regulatory molecules or co-expressed genes.
• Hypothesis generation: Provides visual representations to support exploration and formulation of hypotheses in complex gene expression and regulatory networks.
• Integrative analyses: Facilitates integration of visualization outputs with other Bioconductor tools for combined analyses of high-throughput genomic data.

Methodology:

Implemented in R, Director transforms genomic and expression data into visual representations by leveraging htmltools and a modified D3.js Sankey plugin to generate HTML visualizations.