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Updated: Feb 9, 2026

Biology of Microbial Communities - Interview
Published on: May 28, 2007
BioSankey: Visualization of Microbial Communities Over Time
Alexander Platzer1, Julia Polzin2, Klaus Rembart3
1University Clinic for Internal Medicine III, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Abstract:
Metagenomics provides quantitative measurements for microbial species over time. To obtain a global overview of an experiment and to explore the full potential of a given dataset, intuitive and interactive visualization tools are needed. Therefore, we established BioSankey to visualize microbial species in microbiome studies over time as a Sankey diagram. These diagrams are embedded into a project-specific webpage which depends only on JavaScript and Google API to allow searches of interesting species without requiring a web server or connection to a database. BioSankey is a valuable tool to visualize different data elements from single or dual RNA-seq datasets and additionally enables a straightforward exchange of results among collaboration partners.
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