CoMut: visualizing integrated molecular information with comutation plots.

Abstract

Large-scale sequencing studies have created a need to succinctly visualize genomic characteristics of patient cohorts linked to widely variable phenotypic information. This is often done by visualizing the co-occurrence of variants with comutation plots. Current tools lack the ability to create highly customizable and publication quality comutation plots from arbitrary user data. We developed CoMut, a stand-alone, object-oriented Python package that creates comutation plots from arbitrary input data, including categorical data, continuous data, bar graphs, side bar graphs and data that describes relationships between samples. The CoMut package is open source and is available at https://github.com/vanallenlab/comut under the MIT License, along with documentation and examples. A no installation, easy-to-use implementation is available on Google Colab (see GitHub).