plotsr: Visualising structural similarities and rearrangements between multiple genomes

Summary Third-generation genomic technologies have led to a sharp increase in the number of high-quality genome assemblies. This allows the comparison of multiple assembled genomes of individual species and demands for new tools for visualising their structural properties. Here we present plotsr, an efficient tool to visualize structural similarities and rearrangements between multiple genomes. It can be used to compare genomes on chromosome level or to zoom in on any selected region. In addition, plotsr can augment the visualisation with regional identifiers (e.g. genes or genomic markers) or histogram tracks for continuous features (e.g. GC content or polymorphism density). Availability and implementation plotsr is implemented as a python package and uses the standard matplotlib library for plotting. It is freely available under the MIT license at GitHub ( https://github.com/schneebergerlab/plotsr ) and bioconda ( https://anaconda.org/bioconda/plotsr ). Contact Manish Goel ( [email protected] ), Korbinian Schneeberger ( [email protected] )