Use Circos to create concise, explanatory, unique and print-ready visualizations of your data.

Current version is 0.52.

Try the online version.

Visit this group

Current version is 0.52.
This is a bug release. Issues with ideogram ordering and axis breaks have been addressed.
Current tools version is v0.13.
New is categoryviewer, used to visualize categorical data and a significantly updated tableviewer. Read about the theory and practise of visualizing tabular data.

Circos Online An online version of Circos is now available to visualize tabular data. Turn your tables into informative images!

3x3 table	4x4 table
6x6 table	8x8 table

Conde Nast Porfolio features an article on personalized genome sequencing. An image by Circos appears in a double-page spread. The art direction called for something primarily artistic and visually appealing, but also connected to the content of the article.

An image created by Circos appears on the cover of the Sept/Oct issue of American Scientist.

The image accompanies an article by Elaine Ostrander about dog genetics and illustrates the deep sequence similarity between the human and dog genomes. Read about the figure.

Circos is used to generate a visualization of the 2007 Democratic and Republican Debates. The image was created by Jonathan Corum and Farhana Hossain, who discuss how the image was conceptualized.

Circos is featured in the Science section of the New York Times (22 Jan 2007).

Circos - a data viewer with comparative genomics in mind

Visualizing quantitative information - featuring work of Tufte

A variety of Circos posters are available.

Up to now, each tick block defined a tick series, with the positions of ticks in a series defined by the spacing (absolute or relative).

In this tutorial, you'll see how to define ticks at specific positions.

Ticks at specific absolute positions

To define a tick at a given absolute position, use "position" instead of "spacing".

<tick>
# define position 
position     = 25u
# no spacing definition!
...
</tick>

<tick>
# define multiple positions
position     = 30u,32u,34u,40u
color        = red
...
</tick>
...
</ticks>

Do not define "spacing" when "position" is used.

Ticks at specific relative positions

To place at specific relative positions, use "rposition" and set spacing_type=relative. <tick> # define multiple positions rposition = 0.5,0.7,0.9 spacing_type = relative color = blue label_relative = yes format = %.2f </tick> </ticks>

Note the difference between "position" (for absolute positions) and "rposition" (for relative positions).

Do not define "rspacing" when "rposition" is used.

Ticks at start and end of ideogram

Two special positions are defined. These are "start" and "end". Using these strings you can place a tick at the start or end of the ideogram. This tick can have a label. In addition, you can define the label to be any string by using the 'label' parameter. This parameter is supported for all ticks, but is particularly useful for start/end ideogram ticks. <tick> position = start label = 3' ... </tick> <tick> position = end label = 5' ... </tick>