There are many reason that your data might not be visible, but let's start with the most common reasons:
Ensure that your file is in a format we support
IGB can utilize nearly all of the common data and graph files used with genomics data. However, .sam files and a few others will not work with IGB. For more information about supported file types, and converting to recognized file types, please see File Formats.
Refresh your data
IGB allows you to open files from your desktop, local servers, URLs or other data sources. This can be done through File>Open, or by simply dragging and dropping the file of choice. However, IGB do NOT instantly open these files. Often times, files are very large, there is a long list of the files you would like to see or internet service can be laggy. After adding files to IGB, they can be seen in the Chose load mode list in the center of the Data Access panel. At this point you must refresh to see the data. You can set the individual files to load only the Region in View (zoom in to a specific region or gene) or you can set it to Whole Chromosome which will load the entire sequence, be it a chromosome, or a contig, etc. You can then either refresh one file/track at a time using the symbol next to the track name or you can load everything at once by using the Refresh Data button. For more about loading files, please see Loading and Sharing Data.
.bam files need a .bai file
IGB can readily display .bam files. However, it requires a .bam index file (called a .bai) to be present in the same folder as the .bam file. For more about creating .bam and .bai files, please see Making BAM Files for IGB (RNA-Seq).
.bnib and .fa (FASTA) files appear as a gray bar
IGB shows sequence as a gray bar when zoomed all the way out. As you zoom in onto smaller and smaller segments of the sequence, the gray bar will pop into color and finally color with the actual sequence present. If you have loaded your sequence data, but not refreshed it, it will remain gray with dashes, indicating the data has not yet been loaded. For more about zooming, please see