About the Gene Relationship Demo

The Gene Relationship demo helps illustrate how you can utilize variable link lengths.

To launch the Gene Relationship Demo, select Demo from the Help menu, then open the Gene Relationships demo (see How to Access the VizServer Demos for more information).

The tree in this demo visualizes the results of some research into genetic predisposition to cancer.* Consider the root node (unlabelled) to mean something like "causes cancer", and each of the three main branches to represent one type of cancer. The leaf nodes (labelled) represent genes. The closer to the root a node is, the more likely that gene is to cause cancer of the type represented by the branch it is on. Showing the parent nodes without text focuses the viewer's attention on the relationships expressed by the distance between nodes.

The link lengths are different, but not dramatically. However, as you look down a branch the differences add up. See About Link Length for more details about link lengths.

Unlike the other demo StarTrees, this one has no rectangular node areas. Only the node text appears. You get this effect by setting the textRect applet parameter to False when publishing a StarTree.

*Based on a paper in the public domain, that may be out of date. The point here is to show an example of a StarTree that you can publish using VizServer.