Refer to the Jim Kent's bioinformatics 2010 paper for general description about bigWig as well as bigBed file formats. For file format specification, refer to bbiFile.h in Kent Source Tree.
bigWig file can be generated via two ways:
$ wigToBigWig in.wig chrom.sizes out.bigWig
$ bedGraphToBigWig in.bedGraph chrom.sizes out.bigWig
The converter programs are part of UCSC Kent Source Tree. You can find compiled binaries here.
STEP 1 - set up a web server, most commonly with Apache. Besure to enable byte-range request.
STEP 2 - place bigWig file at a directory on your web server, and obtain the file URL (domain name and relative path to the file).
STEP 3 - follow instructions below to submit custom bigWig track.
At control panel, go to "Tracks" → "Custom track", click tab "bigWig" to find the custom bigWig track submission panel:
Replace the sample bigWig file URL with your file URL, and assign a track name. Push button and the track will be submitted. Following is the sample custom bigWig track under name "aaa bbb":
By default the custom bigWig track has blue color. Right click on the track, and menu options allow you to configure its appearance and more, but the "information" and "link to GEO" options are not applicable here:
Custom bigWig tracks are registered in a table to the top of submission panel:
The track will also appear in selection panel, where it can be selected for multiple purposes:
At bigWig track submission panel click button , additional contents will be revealed:
The two folded boxes represent two ways to assign metadata to bigWig track. First one contains Browser-provided metadata (click banner to reveal contents):
The text contents in the box is organized according to metadata vocabulary. While you can still click +/- to browse the vocabulary, all leaf terms (terms without children) are placed in a drop-down menu in same line with their parent terms.
As example of annotating bigWig track, I selected "MRE-Seq" from "DNA methylation" category, and leave all the non-relevant drop-down menus unchanged:
Then after submitting the track, it goes along with the other MRE-Seq tracks as seen in metadata color map:
Track annotation must be done prior to submitting custom track.
Look for the second folded box in custom bigWig track submission panel:
Click banner to show box contents:
To begin with, click button and custom metadata entry panel will show up:
Just follow the instructions and fill up the blanks:
Click button , this will create a custom metadata term with name "my friends", and 3 values stored inside drop-down menu:
To use custom metadata term to annotate track, simply select a value using the term's drop-down menu. Suppose "James" is selected for the term entered above, the annotated track should look like:
Save custom terms you entered in session to make them persistent.
Last modifed: 1/1/2012