CaSiAn: a Calcium Signaling Analyzer tool

SUMMARY: Ca(2+) is a central second messenger in eukaryotic cells that regulates many cellular processes. Recently, we have indicated that typical Ca(2+) signals are not purely oscillatory as widely assumed, but exhibit stochastic spiking with cell type and pathway specific characteristics. Here, we present the Calcium Signaling Analyzer (CaSiAn), an open source software tool that allows for quantifying these signal characteristics including individual spike properties and time course statistics in a semi-automated manner. CaSiAn provides an intuitive graphical user interface allowing experimentalists to easily process a large amount of Ca(2+) signals, interactively tune peak detection, revise statistical measures and access the quantified signal properties as excel or text files. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: CaSiAn is implemented in Java and available on Github (https://github.com/mmahsa/CaSiAn) as well as on the project page (http://r3lab.uni.lu/web/casa). SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.