Ribbon: intuitive visualization for complex genomic variation

Abstract

Summary: Ribbon is an alignment visualization tool that shows how alignments are positioned within both the reference and read contexts, giving an intuitive view that enables a better understanding of structural variants and the read evidence supporting them. Ribbon was born out of a need to curate complex structural variant calls and determine whether each was well supported by long-read evidence, and it uses the same intuitive visualization method to shed light on contig alignments from genome-to-genome comparisons.

Availability and implementation: Ribbon is freely available online at http://genomeribbon.com/ and is open-source at https://github.com/marianattestad/ribbon.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.