UCSCXenaShiny: an R/CRAN package for interactive analysis of UCSC Xena data.

Abstract

UCSC Xena platform provides huge amounts of processed cancer omics data from large cancer research projects (e.g. TCGA, CCLE and PCAWG) or individual research groups and enables unprecedented research opportunities. However, a graphical user interface-based tool for interactively analyzing UCSC Xena data and generating elegant plots is still lacking, especially for cancer researchers and clinicians with limited programming experience. Here, we present UCSCXenaShiny, an R Shiny package for quickly searching, downloading, exploring, analyzing and visualizing data from UCSC Xena data hubs. This tool could effectively promote the practical use of public data, and can serve as an important complement to the current Xena genomics explorer. UCSCXenaShiny is an open source R package under GPLv3 license and it is freely available at https://github.com/openbiox/UCSCXenaShiny or https://cran.r-project.org/package=UCSCXenaShiny. The docker image is available at https://hub.docker.com/r/shixiangwang/ucscxenashiny. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.