Mango: combining and analyzing heterogeneous biological networks

BACKGROUND: Heterogeneous biological data such as sequence matches, gene expression correlations, protein-protein interactions, and biochemical pathways can be merged and analyzed via graphs, or networks. Existing software for network analysis has limited scalability to large data sets or is only accessible to software developers as libraries. In addition, the polymorphic nature of the data sets requires a more standardized method for integration and exploration. RESULTS: Mango facilitates large network analyses with its Graph Exploration Language, automatic graph attribute handling, and real-time 3-dimensional visualization. On a personal computer Mango can load, merge, and analyze networks with millions of links and can connect to online databases to fetch and merge biological pathways. CONCLUSIONS: Mango is written in C++ and runs on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux. The stand-alone distributions, including the Graph Exploration Language integrated development environment, are freely available for download from http://www.complex.iastate.edu/download/Mango. The Mango User Guide listing all features can be found at http://www.gitbook.com/book/j23414/mango-user-guide.