Visual Analytics Exploration of PubMLST Meningitis Genomic Data

Bacterial meningitis is an infectious disease of the brain that occurs worldwide and is a major public health challenge. A leading cause of this often-fatal disease is the bacterium Neisseria meningitidis, also called meningococcus. Genomics is having a transformational impact on medicine. It enables advances in accurate diagnosis, analysis and prediction of anti-microbial resistance, development and assessment of vaccines etc. PubMLST.org, developed and run by the authors, is a major open-access genomics reference database. It is an integrated collection of databases consisting of phenotype metadata linked to nucleotide sequence data including genome assemblies, for molecular typing of many bacterial species. This paper discusses visual analytics and visualization work conducted to explore and analyse Neisseria meningitidis data from PubMLST.