SLIDE - a web-based tool for interactive visualization of large-scale - omics data

Abstract

Summary: Data visualization is often regarded as a post hoc step for verifying statistically significant results in the analysis of high-throughput datasets. This common practice leaves a large amount of raw data behind, from which more information can be extracted. However, existing solutions do not provide capabilities to explore large-scale raw datasets using biologically sensible queries, nor do they allow user interaction based real-time customization of graphics. To address these drawbacks, we have designed an open-source, web-based tool called Systems-Level Interactive Data Exploration, or SLIDE to visualize large-scale -omics data interactively. SLIDE's interface makes it easier for scientists to explore quantitative expression data in multiple resolutions in a single screen.

Availability and implementation: SLIDE is publicly available under BSD license both as an online version as well as a stand-alone version at https://github.com/soumitag/SLIDE.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Fig. 1.

Feature-level visualization interface of SLIDE on a web browser. The global view heatmap visualizes the entire expression data matrix after hierarchical clustering of the features. The search panel on top of the global view allows real-time search and tagging of features. Search tags highlight features with horizontal (green and brown) stripes alongside the heatmaps, while the search terms are displayed in the search results panel. The detailed view heatmap gives a zoomed-in view of a portion of the entire data while in the interactive dendrogram view, the branches of the tree can be clicked to visualize a subset of the clustered data. See Supplementary Figure S1B for the group-level visualization interface