gbdraw: a genome diagram generator for microbes and organelles
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Motivation
Generating graphical diagrams of microbial and organellar genomes is a common and essential task in bioinformatics. Existing tools often present a trade-off; while powerful programming libraries that require coding skills, graphical applications require server processing or local installation with complex dependency. This highlights the need for a tool that offers both programmatic control for batch processing and graphical accessibility for ease of use.
Results
To fill this gap, I developed gbdraw, a web application that generates circular and linear genome diagrams from self-contained GenBank or DDBJ files or combinations of GFF3 annotation and FASTA sequence files. Its core functions include visualizing annotated features, plotting GC content/skew tracks, and optionally generating pairwise sequence comparisons for comparative genomics. It is available as both a GUI web application and a command-line utility. Unlike existing web-based tools that require data upload to a remote server, gbdraw operates entirely within the user’s web browser. This serverless architecture ensures that sensitive sequence data never leaves the local machine, providing a secure environment for visualizing unpublished genomic data.
Availability and Implementation
gbdraw is implemented in Python 3 (version 3.10+) and is freely available under the MIT license. The web app is available at https://gbdraw.app/ . Source code and documentation are available at https://github.com/satoshikawato/gbdraw . The local version can be installed from the Bioconda channel using a conda-compatible package manager.
