The demand for network visualization of relationships between nodes attributed to different categories grows in various biomedical research scenarios, such as gene regulatory networks, drug-target networks, ligand-receptor interactions and association networks of multi-omics elements. Elegantly visualizing the relationships between nodes with complex metadata of nodes and edges appended may inspire new insights. Here, we developed the crosslink R package, tailored for network visualization of grouped nodes, to provide a series of flexible functions for generating network diagrams. We first designed a CrossLink class for storage of metadata about nodes and edges and manipulation of node coordinates. Then affine transformation and function mapping transformation are implemented to perform fundamental node coordinates transformation by groups, based on which various network layouts can be defined easily. For convenience, we predefined several commonly used layouts, including row, column, arc, polygon and hive, which also can be combined in one layout. Finally, we designed a user-friendly wrapper function to draw network connections, aesthetic mappings of metadata and decoration with related annotation graphs in one interface by taking advantage of the powerful ggplot2 system. Overall, the crosslink R package is easy-to-use for achieving complex visualization of a network diagram of grouped nodes surrounded by associated annotation graphs.
Cosslink is an open-source R package, freely available from github: