Deepthi Jagarapu joined the IGB team in November, 2024, as a Graduate Research Assistant focusing on software development and and the Integrated Genome Browser application. Her major effort involves upgrading the IGB project’s use of the hgsdk library, a complex of Java code that supports a variety of bioinformatics algorithms and offers data models useful for supporting interactive visualization. To better support users interested in visualizing genetic data comparing individual genome sequences to a human genome reference sequence, she is adapting IGB’s presentation of data in VCF format to use functions from the htsgdk library instead of its own custom code.