The Encore project challenges basic views about the Human Genome. This is so awesome, they looked at about 1% of the human genome with a whole range of experimental techniques, about half of the DNA they looked at was of biological relevance and the other half was randomly chosen. They found out that a whole bunch of "junk DNA" was actually doing important regulatory work.
This got me thinking all night about visualizing all this data, thinking about Tufte, and a recent TED lecture from Aseem Agarwala about new radical photo viewing interfaces.
I've been thinking for some time about how to link those various information domains, we have things like Genome data, microarray and expression data, and then the 3D data which projects like Cyttron are working on. It's really important to tie all those information domains together so that we can better understand and appreciate what is going on. Another important area is to compare organisms related by evolution, looking at how DNA and proteins are related to each other. A perfect job for the web, combined with innovative 1D/2D/3D/4D/n-D viewers.
There are two areas that I want to explore, the first is just looking at the Genome from the perspective of general understanding, beauty and art. This would be a really cool project, and could take a whole lifetime, if not many lifetimes.
The second, and the area that I should focus on first, is developing visualizations to solve small and specific problems for actual scientists. By focusing on these smaller projects, it will be easier to actually make some working code.
