New track decorators feature

[Gerardo Perez]

Hello Everyone,

We are excited to introduce the new track decorators feature which allows highlighting parts of features with colors and/or symbols (glyphs/shapes) within a single track.

The genome browser‘s primary way to annotate the genome uses colored rectangles (“exons” for gene tracks) linked by thin lines (“introns”), often stored as a bigBed. These were originally used for genes but then evolved to cover other types of annotations, e.g. enhancers, chromatin modifications, or single nucleotide variants. We usually call these annotations “features”. Each rectangle (“exon”) of a feature has the same color and individual parts cannot be highlighted. If you wanted to highlight parts of the features, traditionally this required a second track.

Track decorators change this: in your custom track and track hubs, you can now highlight parts of a genome annotation with colors or symbols. Track decorators can be shown in two styles, “block” and “glyph” style, and can either be overlaid onto the feature or shown directly underneath. The “block” style option can be used to color exons and introns and can display a label for them. For example, the “block” track decorator could be used to overlay protein domain boundaries on transcripts where usually one would use an entirely different track for the domains.

The “glyph” style option offers 8 different types of glyphs and the color of choice.

The “glyph” style option can be used to draw entirely new symbols, for example, to indicate insertion positions on the genome with small triangles. For more information, see the Track Decorators help page

We would like to thank Jonathan Casper, Max Haeussler, Mark Diekhans, and Gerardo Perez for their work on this release. We appreciate user feedback. If you have questions, feedback, suggestions, glyph style requests, or have found new glyph applications, please contact our mailing list. We would appreciate responses on the creative ways of using the new track decorators feature.