Presentation of ASTERICS at ECCB 2022 (poster)

Our poster on ASTERICS will be presented during ECCB 2022. Please reach out to us if you want more details on our work.

Abstract: The rapid development of omics acquisition techniques has induced the production of a large volume of heterogeneous and multi-level omics datasets measured on the same individuals. Complex information of biological interest is obtained from so-called integration methods, which have been increasingly developed in the past few years. Some of these methods are already available in R packages (like mixOmics). However, the use of these packages still requires to learn a programming language and to have access to sufficient statistical knowledge to choose method parameters and interpret outputs. We present ASTERICS, a web application that aims at making complex exploratory and integration analysis workflows easily available to biologists. Data edition, exploration and integration menus organize the interface to perform data edition, missing value imputation, normalization, data exploration with interactive plots, numerical summaries, PCA, tests, clustering, self-organizing maps, and data integration with various methods. Analyses are adapted to the most standard omics datasets. ASTERICS is also designed to make the analysis flow understandable with a navigable workspace that displays uploaded or obtained datasets and performed analyses in a graph. Finally, it also comes with a documentation for beginners that helps interpret the results, choose proper options or the next analysis to perform. ASTERICS is based on Rserve, pyRserve, and flask. R package versions are controlled using renv. Frontend is developed in Vue.js and uses the CSS framework Bulma. It is available online at http://asterics.miat.inrae.fr/ and can be installed from source or using our docker deployment, both distributed under GPLv3.