Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, 61 Biopolis Drive, Proteos 138673, Singapore.
BMC Bioinformatics. 2013 Oct 3;14:290. doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-14-290.
RNAi screening is a powerful method to study the genetics of intracellular processes in metazoans. Technically, the approach has been largely inspired by techniques and tools developed for compound screening, including those for data analysis. However, by contrast with compounds, RNAi inducing agents can be linked to a large body of gene-centric, publically available data. However, the currently available software applications to analyze RNAi screen data usually lack the ability to visualize associated gene information in an interactive fashion.
Here, we present ScreenSifter, an open-source desktop application developed to facilitate storing, statistical analysis and rapid and intuitive biological data mining of RNAi screening datasets. The interface facilitates meta-data acquisition and long-term safe-storage, while the graphical user interface helps the definition of a hit list and the visualization of biological modules among the hits, through Gene Ontology and protein-protein interaction analyses. The application also allows the visualization of screen-to-screen comparisons.
Our software package, ScreenSifter, can accelerate and facilitate screen data analysis and enable discovery by providing unique biological data visualization capabilities.
RNAi 筛选是研究后生动物细胞内过程遗传学的强大方法。从技术上讲，该方法主要受到用于化合物筛选的技术和工具的启发，包括数据分析工具。然而，与化合物相比，RNAi 诱导剂可以与大量以基因为中心的、公开可用的数据相关联。然而，目前可用于分析 RNAi 筛选数据的软件应用程序通常缺乏以交互方式可视化相关基因信息的能力。
在这里，我们介绍了 ScreenSifter，这是一个开源的桌面应用程序，旨在促进 RNAi 筛选数据集的存储、统计分析和快速直观的生物数据挖掘。该界面有助于元数据的获取和长期安全存储，而图形用户界面则通过基因本体论和蛋白质-蛋白质相互作用分析，帮助定义命中列表并可视化命中之间的生物模块。该应用程序还允许进行屏幕间比较的可视化。
我们的软件包 ScreenSifter 通过提供独特的生物数据可视化功能，可以加速和简化屏幕数据分析，并通过发现来实现。
