I am a bioinformatician interested in visualizations too. I totally understand your situation wanting to use D3 but can't because of the amount of bio data. I'

I am a bioinformatician interested in visualizations too. I totally understand your situation wanting to use D3 but can't because of the amount of bio data. I've been trying to develop a toy genome browser as a pet project while procrastinating on writing my thesis. I faced a similar problem when rendering a genome feature density plot and found mouse interactions with it was painfully slow. I solved it by rendering the svg with d3 and then use canvg.js to convert the svg into canvas. You can see the toy example here: http://www.nextgenetics.net/tools/browser/browser.html http://www.nextgenetics.net/tools/browser/browser.html This prototype shows all genes from human chromosome 1. You can use WASD to scroll and Q/E to zoom in and out. The white density plot on the bottom is d3 made and converted into canvas with canvg. All svg are rendered with d3 using an element pooling system.