Introduction

Cytoscape is a project dedicated to building open-source network visualization and analysis software. A software “Core” provides basic functionality to layout and query the network and to visually integrate the network with state data. The Core is extensible through a plug-in architecture, allowing rapid development of additional computational analyses and features.

Cytoscape's roots are in Systems Biology where it is used for integrating biomolecular interaction networks with high-throughput expression data and other molecular state information. Although applicable to any system of molecular components and interactions, Cytoscape is most powerful when used in conjunction with large databases of protein-protein, protein-DNA, and genetic interactions that are increasingly available for humans and model organisms. Cytoscape allows the visual integration of the network with expression profiles, phenotypes, and other molecular state information and to link the network to databases of functional annotations. The central organizing metaphor of Cytoscape is a network (graph), with genes, proteins, and molecules represented as nodes and interactions represented as links, i.e. edges, between nodes.

Development Cytoscape is a collaborative project between the Institute for Systems Biology (Leroy Hood lab), the University of California San Diego (Trey Ideker lab), Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (Chris Sander lab), the Institut Pasteur (Benno Schwikowski lab), Agilent Technologies (Annette Adler lab) and the University of California, San Francisco (Bruce Conklin lab).

Visit http://www.cytoscape.org for more information.

License Cytoscape is protected under the GNU LGPL (Lesser General Public License). The License is included as an appendix to this manual, but can also be found online: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.txt Cytoscape also includes a number of other open source libraries, which are detailed in Acknowledgements below.

What’s New in 2.4

Cytoscape version 2.4 contains several new features, plus improvements to the performance and usability of the software. These include:

Publication quality image generation. This includes:
- Node label position adjustment.
- Automatic Visual Legend generator.
- Node position fine-tuning by arrow keys.
- The ability to override selected VizMap settings.
Quick Find plugin.
New Cytoscape icons for a cleaner user interface.
Consolidated network import capabilities.
- Import network from remote data sources (through http or ftp).
- Default support for the following file formats:
  - Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML)
  - BioPAX Level 1 and 2
  - PSI-MI (Level 1 and 2.5)
  - Delimited text table (TAB delimited text file, CSV, etc.)
  - Excel (.xls) format file.
New Ontology Server. This will eventually replace the BioDataServer. New Ontology Server features include:
- Native support for OBO format ontology files. Users can import many different ontologies in the OBO format.
- Ability to visualize the ontology tree as a network (DAG).
- Full support for Gene Association files.
Support for Java SE 5.
Many, many bug fixes!