DoRes within CellMissy: dose-response analysis on cell migration and related data.

Abstract

In cancer research, cell-based assays are used to assess cell migration and invasion. The major bottleneck is the lack of automated tools to visualize and analyse the large amounts of biological dose-response data produced. To address this challenge, we have developed an automated and free software package for dose-response analyses, DoRes, which is released as an add-on of the freely available and open-source tool CellMissy, dedicated to the management and analysis of cell migration data. DoRes implements non-linear curve fitting functionality into a robust, user-friendly and flexible software package with the possibility of importing a tabular file or starting from a cell migration experiment. We demonstrate the ability of the software by analysing public dose-response data and a typical cell migration experiment, and show that the extracted dose-response parameters and the calculated statistical values are consistently comparable to those of the widely used, commercial software GraphPad Prism. The software here presented is a new module in CellMissy, an open-source and cross-platform package dedicated to the management, storage and analysis of cell migration data. The new module is written in Java, and inherits the cross-platform support from CellMissy. Source code and binaries are freely available under the Apache2 open-source licence at https://github.com/compomics/cellmissy/. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.