WIlsON: Web-based Interactive Omics VisualizatioN.

Abstract

High throughput (HT) screens in the omics field are typically analyzed by automated pipelines that generate static visualizations and comprehensive spreadsheet data for scientists. However, exploratory and hypothesis driven data analysis are key aspects of the understanding of biological systems, both generating extensive need for customized and dynamic visualization. Here we describe WIlsON, an interactive workbench for analysis and visualization of multi-omics data. It is primarily intended to empower screening platforms to offer access to pre-calculated HT screen results to the non-computational scientist. Facilitated by an open file format, WIlsON supports all types of omics screens, serves results via a web-based dashboard, and enables end users to perform analyses and generate publication-ready plots. We implemented WIlsON in R with a focus on extensibility using the modular Shiny and Plotly frameworks. A demo of the interactive workbench without limitations may be accessed at http://loosolab.mpi-bn.mpg.de. A standalone Docker container as well as the source code of WIlsON are freely available from our Docker hub https://hub.docker. com/r/loosolab/wilson, CRAN https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/wilson/, and GitHub repository https://github.molgen.mpg.de/loosolab/wilson-apps, respectively.