[genome-announce] New barChart track format

[Christopher Lee]

Are you loving the GTEx track and want to make a similar barChart display track for yourself? Are you wondering how you can get boxplots of data points to show up on track item details pages? Well, look no further as we have just released support for a GTEx style barChart track format. This new track format is available for use with custom tracks, and in binary format (bigBarChart) for use in track hubs. Both barChart and bigBarChart formats support external matrix and sample files specifying data points for a boxplot display on details pages, while the barChart/bigBarChart file typically specifies summary values (mean or median) over the matrix, which determines the bar heights. See the documentation for further explanation and examples.

Along with the release of this new track format are some tools that help to create the tracks, expMatrixToBarchartBed and bedJoinTabOffset. Both utilities are free for all use cases, and can be downloaded from our directory of utilities. For more information about this new track format and helper scripts, please see the help documentation.

Christopher Lee

UCSC Genomics Institute