Integration and virtual reality exploration of biomedical data with CmPI and VANTED

Abstract

Abstract Modelling and analysis of metabolic processes is an established research field in Computational Systems Biology and Medicine. There are many different approaches for modelling as well as for visualization, but often these methods ignore the subcellular localization of proteins, enzymes and transporters involved in the metabolic processes. Over the recent years, we developed two tools: CELLmicrocosmos 4 PathwayIntegration (CmPI) and VANTED. CmPI is used to analyse, visualize and explore potential subcellular localizations in a cell environment. CmPI provides import capabilities for metabolic pathways and simple visualization of directed networks showing the enzyme-compound relationships inside this environment in 2D as well as 3D. VANTED allows to analyse and visualize biological networks, to integrate data into these networks and simulate their dynamics. Here, we will discuss future perspectives of these approaches and how to extend the capabilities of CmPI's localization method to provide a) complex modelling, visualization and exploration of metabolic networks in combination with -omics data, and b) immersive analytics of the spatially distributed networks using different Virtual Reality-based technologies. We discuss the prototypic integration of CmPI with VANTED and the large display visualization framework Omegalib in combination with a semi-immersive monitor zSpace™ and CAVE2™.