VisualMOA is an applet which provides a visual frontend for the Microbial Online Analysis database, which contains over 600 sequenced genomes of bacteria, archaea, and small worms and plants.
It's intended for an audience of bioinformatics/biology people, but I tried to make the controls and visualization intuitive enough for non-biologists.
Organisms can be selected through either a radial or tree based view. Once an organism is selected, the known chromosomes or plasmids for that organism are displayed and can be selected to view the genes on that chromosome. Genes are coloured by their function. Further information can be displayed by hovering over the gene. If it exists, microbe properties, images and descriptions are displayed.
It pauses for a few seconds when loading genome sequences (the applet must call a php script which searches a 3 million row MySQL table).
http://ratite.cs.dal.ca/visualmoa
For more information on what you're seeing, please check out:
http://ratite.cs.dal.ca/visualmoa/applet/what.html
Unfortunately, we don't have mammals in our database, even through they've been sequenced. Storing this information would be a strain on our resources, and our lab group focuses on microbes.
