Ribbon: Visualizing complex genome alignments and structural variation

To the Editor Visualization has played an extremely important role in the current genomic revolution to inspect and understand variants, expression patterns, evolutionary changes, and a number of other relationships^1–3. However, most of the information in read-to-reference or genome-genome alignments is lost for structural variations in the one-dimensional views of most genome browsers showing only reference coordinates. Instead, structural variations captured by long reads or assembled contigs often need more context to understand, including alignments and other genomic information from multiple chromosomes.