Biodalliance: fast, embeddable genome visualization

Dalliance is a genome viewing tool that aims to offer a high level of interactivity while working entirely within your web browser. It works with current versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari and (with minor visual glitches) Internet Explorer 11. It is also usable with current mobile web browsers.

To try it, visit http://www.biodalliance.org/human37.html.

Development

Dalliance has now switched to a Gulp-based build system. It it still possible to use the files in the js directory directly, but this is now deprecated and may not be supported in future.

Before building, please install Node.js, which is needed for the NPM package manager.

To build:

    (sudo?) npm install -g gulp
    npm install # Install dependencies
    gulp        # Build Dalliance

...then open any of the HTML files in the example-browsers directory to test.

Adding extra data

Dalliance loads data via the DAS protocol. There's a button to click that will let you add DAS sources. If what you're after is in the registry, you should just be able to select and add, otherwise you'll need to type a URL.

You can also add data directly from indexed binary files (currently bigwig, bigbed and BAM, probably other formats in the future). Binary files can either be hosted on a web server or loaded from local disk.

However, there is one caveat. Since Dalliance is a pure Javascript program running in your web browser, it is normally subject to the "same origin policy", which only permits Javascript code to access resources on the same server. To get round this, DAS servers need to support the W3C CORS extension. The latest versions of Dazzle, Proserver and MyDAS should implement this by default.

Reporting bugs

Dalliance is under active development and we welcome your suggestions. Right now, probably the best place for bug reports or feature requests is the Github issue tracker.

There is also a mailing list where the project can be discussed.