Medusa: A tool for exploring and clustering biological networks

Abstract

Background: Biological processes such as metabolic pathways, gene regulation or protein-protein interactions are often represented as graphs in systems biology. The understanding of such networks, their analysis, and their visualization are today important challenges in life sciences. While a great variety of visualization tools that try to address most of these challenges already exists, only few of them succeed to bridge the gap between visualization and network analysis. Findings: Medusa is a powerful tool for visualization and clustering analysis of large-scale biological networks. It is highly interactive and it supports weighted and unweighted multi-edged directed and undirected graphs. It combines a variety of layouts and clustering methods for comprehensive views and advanced data analysis. Its main purpose is to integrate visualization and analysis of heterogeneous data from different sources into a single network.