Friday, September 2, 2011

Install Circos on Windows

Circos is an excellent software to create nice visualization of your data (esp Genetic data,see below for examples).

To install Circos on your PC is not too straightfoward since it is written in Perl (which is not natively supported in Windows). So to get Circos running on your computer, you need
1) Download Circos (along with the tutorial,courses)  Current version: 0.55
2) Get a copy of Strawberry Perl and install on your computer
3) You need some extra modules to get Circos running. The required list of moduels in http://circos.ca/tutorials/lessons/configuration/perl_and_modules/ doesn't apply for Windows installation. I posted mine (Windows Vista+Fresh installation of Strawberry Perl),Some more mudules are required to run circos and use the tools

  • Config::General
  • List::MoreUtils
  • Math::Bezier
  • Math::Round
  • Math::VecStat
  • Params::Validate
  • Readonly
  • Regexp::Common
  • Set::IntSpan
  • Math::Random (required to use tableviewer::make-table tool)
  • Statistics::Descriptive (required to use tableviewer::parse-table tool)
  • Graphics::ColorObject
  • Color::LIbrary
  • Pod::Readme
  • Test::Pod
  • Test::Pod::Coverage
  • Test::Portability::Files
  • Tie::Sub

To install modules in perl, run
perl -MCPAN -e shell

then use
install [module name]
In order to test if your installation works. Download circos tool and decompress into circos installation directory (for example on my computer it is c:\circos-0.55\tools). Follow instructions on http://circos.ca/presentations/articles/vis_tables2/ see if you can create an image. Note: The instructions on that page doesn't apply to windows users. Add perl before each commonad in ourder to get perl scripts running. Alternatively, you can install Cygwin. But you need to put circos in the scope of Cygwin installation.