NeoHiC: A web application for the analysis of Hi-C data

High-throughput sequencing Chromosome Conformation Capture (Hi-C) allows the study of chromatin interactions and 3D chromosome folding on a larger scale. A graph-based multi-level representation of Hi-C data is essential for proper visualisation of the spatial pattern they represent, in particular for comparing different experiments or for re-mapping omics-data in a space-aware context. The size of the HiC data hampers the straightforward use of currently available graph visualisation tools and libraries. In this paper, we present the first version of NeoHiC, a user-friendly web application for the progressive graph visualisation of Hi-C data based on the use of the Neo4j graph database. The user could select the richness of the environment of the query gene by choosing among a large number of proximity and distance metrics.