Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 23, 2025

Heuristic Mining of Hierarchical Genotypes and Accessory Genome Loci in Bacterial Populations
Published on: December 7, 2021
plotsr: visualizing structural similarities and rearrangements between multiple genomes
Manish Goel1,2, Korbinian Schneeberger1,2
1Faculty of Biology, LMU Munich, Planegg-Martinsried 82152, Germany.
Summary:
Third-generation genome sequencing technologies have led to a sharp increase in the number of high-quality genome assemblies. This allows the comparison of multiple assembled genomes of individual species and demands new tools for visualizing their structural properties. Here, we present plotsr, an efficient tool to visualize structural similarities and rearrangements between genomes. It can be used to compare genomes on chromosome level or to zoom in on any selected region. In addition, plotsr can augment the visualization with regional identifiers (e.g. genes or genomic markers) or histogram tracks for continuous features (e.g. GC content or polymorphism density).
Availability And Implementation:
plotsr is implemented as a python package and uses the standard matplotlib library for plotting. It is freely available under the MIT license at GitHub (https://github.com/schneebergerlab/plotsr) and bioconda (https://anaconda.org/bioconda/plotsr).
Supplementary Information:
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Related Concept Videos
Evolutionary Relationships through Genome Comparisons
Comparing Mitochondrial, Chloroplast, and Prokaryotic Genomes
Comparing Copy Number Variations and SNPs
Copy number variations or CNVs are the structural variations that cover more than 1kb of DNA sequence. The single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), on the other hand, is a single nucleotide change or a point mutation that is found in more than 1%...
Modern Molecular Taxonomy
Gene Duplication and Divergence
The duplicated copies of the gene are called Paralogs. Paralogs with similar sequences and functions form a gene family. Across several species, a large number of gene families are...
Synteny and Evolution
Around 80 million years ago, the human and mice lineages diverged from the common ancestor. During the course of evolution, the ancestral...

