VolcaNoseR is a web app for creating, exploring, labeling and sharing volcano plots

Scientific Reports, vol. 10, pp. 20560

Abstract

Comparative genome- and proteome-wide screens yield large amounts of data. To efficiently present such datasets and to simplify the identification of hits, the results are often presented in a type of scatterplot known as a volcano plot, which shows a measure of effect size versus a measure of significance. The data points with the largest effect size and a statistical significance beyond a user-defined threshold are considered as hits. Such hits are usually annotated in the plot by a label with their name. Volcano plots can represent ten thousands of data points, of which typically only a handful is annotated. The information of data that is not annotated is hardly or not accessible. To simplify access to the data and enable its re-use, we have developed an open source and online web tool with R/Shiny. The web app is named VolcaNoseR and it can be used to create, explore, label and share volcano plots ( https://huygens.science.uva.nl/VolcaNoseR ). When the data is stored in an online data repository, the web app can retrieve that data together with user-defined settings to generate a customized, interactive volcano plot. Users can interact with the data, adjust the plot and share their modified plot together with the underlying data. Therefore, VolcaNoseR increases the transparency and re-use of large comparative genome- and proteome-wide datasets.

Authors 2

1. Joachim Goedhart corresponding

   University of Amsterdam · Van Leeuwenhoek Centre for Advanced Microscopy

   Affiliation as printed

   Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences, Section of Molecular Cytology, van Leeuwenhoek Centre for Advanced Microscopy, University of Amsterdam, P.O. Box 94215, 1090 GE, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. j.goedhart@uva.nl

   Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences, Section of Molecular Cytology, van Leeuwenhoek Centre for Advanced Microscopy, University of Amsterdam, P.O. Box 94215, 1090 GE, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2. Martijn S. Luijsterburg Aachen Department of Human Genetics

   Leiden University Medical Center

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Human Genetics, Leiden University Medical Center, Einthovenweg 20, 2333 ZC, Leiden, The Netherlands