Seed: a user-friendly tool for exploring and visualizing microbial community data

Summary: In this article we present Simple Exploration of Ecological Data (Seed), a data exploration tool for microbial communities. Seed is written in R using the Shiny library. This provides access to powerful R-based functions and libraries through a simple user interface. Seed allows users to explore ecological datasets using principal coordinate analyses, scatter plots, bar plots, hierarchal clustering and heatmaps. Availability and implementation: Seed is open source and available at https://github.com/danlbek/Seed. Contact: danlbek@gmail.com Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.