Would you sum up the Haploview paper for our readers?
Human genetics research has made great strides recently in
trying to understand the connection between genetic variation
among individuals and complex traits like height, behavior,
heart disease, and cancer. All of this research has brought a
flood of new data and created a need for freely available
analysis software. Haploview fills one such niche, allowing
people to do a number of basic analyses in one straightforward
package.
What influenced your team to design this program?
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“One of the main advantages of Haploview is that it
takes the basic analyses of genetic association studies
and makes them accessible to users without a
computational background.” |
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The Haploview Team's
most-cited paper with 476 cites to date: |
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Barrett JC,
et al., "Haploview: analysis and visualization of LD and
haplotype maps," Bioinformatics 21(2): 263-5, 15
January 2005. |
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Source:
Essential Science Indicators |
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Haploview was originally developed as an in-house tool with
basic LD analysis functionality in 2002. Once we realized that
the work we were doing was becoming widespread, we decided to
put it together in a more user-friendly package and distribute
it freely. This was in part driven by our work with the HapMap
project—as that project began to distribute variation data, we
added functionality to Haploview to allow researchers to access
visualizations and analyses of that data seamlessly.
What are some of the features/advantages of Haploview?
One of the main advantages of Haploview is that it takes the
basic analyses of genetic association studies and makes them
accessible to users without a computational background. While we
still feel it's important to fully understand a dataset (rather
than just plugging it into a program and pressing 'Go') we think
Haploview helps users to enhance that understanding by allowing
them to explore their data in a way that visually presents
complex relationships in the data.
Another advantage of the way in which Haploview has been
developed (regular updates and contributions from the open
source community) is that it's allowed us to keep abreast of new
developments in the field, so that Haploview grows with users'
needs.
Who benefits from using Haploview?
Haploview's combination of a GUI and command-line interface
lend it to two distinct target groups: (1) computational
researchers who can use Haploview as a jumping-off point for
more elaborate analyses, and (2) biologists and students who can
use it as an introduction to the field.
How was Haploview received by the community? Do you feel this is
reflected in the amount of citations the paper has been receiving?
We're all very pleased with how widely Haploview is used.
It's very satisfying to know that the culmination of all our
hard work has been appreciated and integrated into the field.
Since Haploview is constantly being upgraded and improved we
hope to continue to make a contribution.
David Bender for the Haploview Team
The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Cambridge, MA, USA
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CORRECTION TO THIS ARTICLE
Earlier versions of this article incorrectly listed the name
of The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. |
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