The Omics Dashboard for interactive exploration of gene-expression data

The Omics Dashboard is a software tool for interactive exploration and analysis of gene-expression datasets. The Omics Dashboard is organized as a hierarchy of cellular systems. At the highest level of the hierarchy the Dashboard contains graphical panels depicting systems such as biosynthesis, energy metabolism, regulation and central dogma. Each of those panels contains a series of X–Y plots depicting expression levels of subsystems of that panel, e.g. subsystems within the central dogma panel include transcription, translation and protein maturation and folding. The Dashboard presents a visual read-out of the expression status of cellular systems to facilitate a rapid top-down user survey of how all cellular systems are responding to a given stimulus, and to enable the user to quickly view the responses of genes within specific systems of interest. Although the Dashboard is complementary to traditional statistical methods for analysis of gene-expression data, we show how it can detect changes in gene expression that statistical techniques may overlook. We present the capabilities of the Dashboard using two case studies: the analysis of lipid production for the marine alga Thalassiosira pseudonana, and an investigation of a shift from anaerobic to aerobic growth for the bacterium Escherichia coli.