Visualization Community: explore, create and analyze complex genomic data visualizations by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

To facilitate the creation and exploration of genomic and epigenomic visualization tools created at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, our team developed the St. Jude Cloud Visualization Community (https://viz.stjude.cloud/, VizCom). Launched in 2020, this innovative platform allows researchers to explore interactive visualizations created by scientists at St. Jude, develop custom visualizations with their own data, and serves as a public visualization repository integrated within the St. Jude Cloud (https://www.stjude.cloud/) data sharing ecosystem. We believe that scientific visualization is of the utmost importance to cancer research, as spotting trends and detecting outliers in large-scale, high-dimensional data is much easier in this medium than digging through large Excel spreadsheets filled with data. Public accessibility to the data underlying these studies enables the broad dissemination and exploration of this complex data, thereby speeding discoveries and, ultimately, rapidly increasing our collective understanding of these complex diseases. VizCom provides a secure, private experience for collaborative development of these visualizations combined with a controlled release process. This enables focused scientific communities to come together within VizCom to share their data and move their research forward. When visualizations are ready to be made public, the portal supports creating Communities: a dedicated landing page for visualizations grouped by a particular domain. Last, our VizEditor, developed and released in 2022, allows users to create their own visualizations using ProteinPaint and GenomePaint through our point-and-click interface. For those with mastery over the code, a code editor is provided for detailed customization. VizCom is the first platform dedicated to enabling the development and sharing of interactive high-quality data-rich visualizations in the genomics space, and we hope that it will continue to enhance data exploration and hypothesis generation for cancer research.