MARCARviz: Interactive web-platform for exploratory analysis of toxicogenomics data for nongenotoxic hepatocarcinogenesis
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Molecular Biology, Oncology, Pharmacology
- Keywords
- Transcriptomics, Toxicology, Nongenotoxic Carcinogenicity, Visualization
- Copyright
- © 2016 Römer et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. MARCARviz: Interactive web-platform for exploratory analysis of toxicogenomics data for nongenotoxic hepatocarcinogenesis. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2393v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2393v1
Abstract
The late detection of non-genotoxic carcinogens in the drug development process can delay drug candidates for unmet medical needs from reaching the market despite considerable investments in their development. To enable faster, safer, and less expensive development of medications for patients, the MARCAR project generated a large set of transcriptomic data to investigate the underlying mechanisms of non-genotoxic hepatocarcinogenesis and to identify potential biomarkers for early detection of tumor formation in the rodent liver. The effective mining of these high-dimensional datasets is a non-trivial task that usually requires bioinformatics support to extract relevant mechanistic patterns and confirm toxicological hypotheses. Here, we present MARCARviz, a web-platform that enables biologists to (a) quickly address the most common questions associated with the MARCAR microarray data, to (b) identify relevant patterns in the data, and to (c) generate or confirm mechanistic hypotheses about non-genotoxic effects leading to cancer formation. The major advantage of MARCARviz is that there is no software or advanced technical knowledge required to perform powerful analyses and generate visualizations of the MARCAR data. MARCARviz greatly facilitates the confirmation of published MARCAR results and generation of new insights from the collected data by the greater public without the requirement for tedious pre-processing steps. MARCARviz is publicly available from https://tea.cs.uni-tuebingen.de/.
Author Comment
This is an article which has been accepted for the "GCB 2016 Conference".