The drawing that could have been a graph

When using drawings instead of graphs, almost always, you will loose information in the drawing that is contained in the data underlying (as simplification is often the point of using drawings in the first place). This tutorial is an example of this dilemma, where I first wanted to make an illustration showing the similarity between two proteins, but then decided this could, and should in fact be, a graph.

While there are probably a thousand ways to visualise protein alignments already out there, I could not find one that was simple enough for an introductory slide so I decided to make my own. I wanted to be able to see in one view you where two proteins diverge in sequence and how this relates to the location of their functional domains. While you can of course show a domainogram of two proteins and just say “they are most conserved within their functional domains” , or “domain X is not conserved but domain Y is”, you can also actually visualise this! And for me this made it actually also much more clear for myself.