Lamond Group updates DataShop September 5, 2014 The Lamond Group has released a new, updated version of their data visualization and analysis application, called ‘DataShop’ (http://www.peptracker.com/ds). DataShop provides a wide range of options for plotting and annotating data and is specifically designed to handle efficiently very large data sets with hundreds of thousands to over a million data points. It also provides a built in user interface for running R scripts, enabling convenient statistical analysis of data loaded into the DataShop application. The new version – DataShop R1.2 – now has additional options for plot types, including Venn diagrams, Pie charts and 4-D Bubble plots. It also includes numerous improvements to the user interface, minor bug fixes and upgrades in speed and performance over the previous version. The emphasis in creating DataShop has been on providing powerful computational tools that allow users to interact with their data via an intuitive, user-friendly graphical interface. It allows rapid graphical filtering (‘gating’) of data displayed within plots and the ability to re-plot and compare results from multiple data sets and using the output of filtered subsets of data. The resulting plots and analyses can be readily customized and conveniently exported for use in publications and powerpoint presentations etc. DataShop has been created primarily by Rob Kent, with help from colleagues in the PepTracker team and input from other members of the Lamond group. It is part of the PepTracker software project in the Lamond Laboratory, which aims to create user-driven tools for improving the management, visualisation, analysis and sharing of complex, large data sets from experiments on proteomics and gene expression (http://www.peptracker.com). However, while developed primarily as an aid for analysis of proteomics data, the DataShop application has been deliberately designed with a flexible format that can be used to analyse more or less any type of data that is presented in a tabular format (e.g. an excel file). DataShop R1.2 is available now and free to download and use (http://www.peptracker.com/ds). It can be installed on computers running most recent versions of either Windows, or Mac OSX, operating systems. As with previous versions it comes with an extensive, in-built ‘Help’ menu and further information on DataShop and its features can be found via the PepTracker website. Feedback is welcomed, as are requests for new features in future releases of DataShop. You can visit the PepTracker team in the Laboratory for Quantitative Proteomics on the M Floor of the new CTIR building, or else contact them via email (peptracker@dundee.ac.uk). Professor Angus Lamond, who heads the Laboratory for Quantitative Proteomics in the newly opened CTIR Building, said, “The PepTracker DataShop application is central to our aim of providing biologists with powerful, but easy to use computational tools that are specifically designed to address the practical issues of working interactively with the large and complex types of data sets we now generate routinely. We are also very enthusiastic about the exciting road map we have planned for further improvements and new features in DataShop that will appear in future versions.”
