The EntOptLayout Cytoscape plug-in for the efficient visualization of major protein complexes in protein-protein interaction and signalling networks.

MOTIVATION: Network visualizations of complex biological datasets usually result in 'hairball' images, which do not discriminate network modules.

RESULTS: We present the EntOptLayout Cytoscape plug-in based on a recently developed network representation theory. The plug-in provides an efficient visualization of network modules, which represent major protein complexes in protein-protein interaction and signalling networks. Importantly, the tool gives a quality score of the network visualization by calculating the information loss between the input data and the visual representation showing a 3- to 25-fold improvement over conventional methods.

AVAILABILITY: The plug-in (running on Windows, Linux, or Mac OS) and its tutorial (both in written and video forms) can be downloaded freely under the terms of the MIT license from: https://apps.cytoscape.org/apps/entoptlayout.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.