IonFlow: a galaxy tool for the analysis of ionomics data sets.

Abstract

<h4>Introduction</h4>Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) experiments generate complex multi-dimensional data sets that require specialist data analysis tools.<h4>Objective</h4>Here we describe tools to facilitate analysis of the ionome composed of high-throughput elemental profiling data.<h4>Methods</h4>IonFlow is a Galaxy tool written in R for ionomics data analysis and is freely accessible at https://github.com/wanchanglin/ionflow . It is designed as a pipeline that can process raw data to enable exploration and interpretation using multivariate statistical techniques and network-based algorithms, including principal components analysis, hierarchical clustering, relevance network extraction and analysis, and gene set enrichment analysis.<h4>Results and conclusion</h4>The pipeline is described and tested on two benchmark data sets of the haploid S. Cerevisiae ionome and of the human HeLa cell ionome.