Clockwise from top right, the genomes of a human, a chimpanzee, a mouse and a zebrafish are arranged in a circle, with each color square corresponding to a pair of chromosomes. Lines connect similar DNA sequences, visually emphasizing just how much DNA we share with other species. (Image: Martin Krzywinski/EMBO)

An ongoing project with the British Library compares our genome with the genomes of 16 different species, from horse to platypus. In each panel, a circle represents the comparison between one human chromosome, its DNA arranged along the circle's bottom half, and the entire genome of a given species, located on the circle's top half. (Image: Martin Krzywinski)

On September 13, 1848, an explosion sent an iron rod through the skull of a railroad construction foreman named Phineas Gage. Incredibly, Gage survived, though his personality and temperament changed dramatically, making him an early textbook case in the neuroanatomy of behavior. In this image, researchers modeled how the bar would have disrupted specific brain systems, arrayed on the perimeter of a Circos plot, and the connections between them. (Image: Van Horn et al./PNAS)

For this image, Krzywinski tried to think of genomes in a new way, converting their characteristics — namely, the amount of repeating content — into directional vectors. "Now these genomes have accidental shapes. It's just a pure path of the algorithm," he said. "Some are circular, some look like continents or countries. I just thought it was an engaging way to look at a genome without just giving the sequence." Image: Martin Krzywinski)

To an information designer, the number Pi is irresistible. To make these images, Krzywinski color-coded its digits -- at left, the first 3,422; at right, the first 123,201 — and arranged them in an Archimedean spiral. Image: Martin Krzywinski

Bad Hairball: Visualizations like these helped inspire Krzywinski's work. Known colloquially as hairballs, they're used to visualize network interactions. In the right context, they're quite useful — but when networks get big and complicated, they live up to their nickname. "A lot of hairballs look random," said Krzywinski. "And a lot of times the structure can confuse us into thinking we know something we actually don't." The hairball above, for example, derived from a map of human protein interaction, suggests an architecture that doesn't actually exist. "The apparent banding of the yellow nodes is an artifact of the graph layout algorithm," wrote the researchers. The algorithm "does not explain the evident separation of red and blue edges" — yet to the naked eye, it does. Image: Rual et al./Nature

Krzywinski's newest visualization tool is the Hive Plot, in which network nodes are assigned to axes defined by properties like connectivity, density and centrality. Thusly arrayed, structural characteristics become evident, as in the comparison above of E. coli (left) and Linux (right), with the original researchers' version below it. Key to designing hive plots, or any visualization, is knowing what parameters to emphasize, said Krzywinski. Though some informaticists still believe that, with enough data, rules will simply emerge from raw information, "I don't trust that," he said. "You need to curate, to explain. Things don't just come out like that." (Images: Martin Krzywinski)

Here researchers compare three strains of Arabidopsis, a plant frequently used as a model organism in plant genetics, with their common ancestor. Each strain's genome is laid out on one axis; two regions are connected if they derive from the same ancestral sequence. (Image: Mandáková et al./The Plant Cell)

Circos hasn't only been used to compare genomes, but also to portray them, as with Gloeobacter violaceus, a direct-line descendant of one of the first photosynthetic bacteria. Though it no doubt means more to a scientist than a layman, it's still a compelling image: Compared to genomic representations from a decade ago, this is one of profound, immediately evident richness. Image: Saw et al./PLoS One

Not all of Krzywinski's work involves data visualization. These mouse embryonic blood vessels, featured on a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences cover last year, are composited from multiple microscopic cross-sections, their colors tweaked with a mental eye to Hubble Telescope photographs and Star Trek starscapes. "One of my goals in life, which I can now say has been accomplished," said Krzywinski, "is to make biology look like astrophysics." Image: Krzywinski/PNAS