PlotTwist - a web app for plotting and annotating time-series data

Abstract

The results from time-dependent experiments are often used to generate plots that visualize how the data evolves over time. To simplify state-of-the-art data visualization and annotation of data from such experiments, an open source tool was created with R/shiny that does not require coding skills to operate. The freely available web app accepts wide (spreadsheet) and tidy data and offers a range of options to normalize the data. The data from individual objects can be shown in three different ways: (i) lines with unique colors, (ii) small multiples and (iii) heatmap-style display. Next to this, the mean can be displayed with a 95% confidence interval for the visual comparison of different conditions. Several color blind friendly palettes are available to label the data and/or statistics. The plots can be annotated with graphical features and/or text to indicate any perturbations that were applied during the time-lapse experiments. All user-defined settings can be stored for reproducibility of the data visualization. The app is dubbed PlotTwist and is available online: https://huygens.science.uva.nl/PlotTwist\n\n\n\nO_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=166 SRC=\"FIGDIR/small/745612v2_ufig1.gif\" ALT=\"Figure 1\">\nView larger version (34K):\norg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1bad5e6org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1312023org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@350cb5org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@d556c6_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG