Heat∗seq: An interactive web tool for high-throughput sequencing experiment comparison with public data

Abstract

Summary: Better protocols and decreasing costs have made high-throughput sequencing experiments now accessible even to small experimental laboratories. However, comparing one or few experiments generated by an individual lab to the vast amount of relevant data freely available in the public domain might be limited due to lack of bioinformatics expertise. Though several tools, including genome browsers, allow such comparison at a single gene level, they do not provide a genome-wide view. We developed Heat∗seq, a web-tool that allows genome scale comparison of high throughput experiments chromatin immuno-precipitation followed by sequencing, RNA-sequencing and Cap Analysis of Gene Expression) provided by a user, to the data in the public domain. Heat∗seq currently contains over 12 000 experiments across diverse tissues and cell types in human, mouse and drosophila. Heat∗seq displays interactive correlation heatmaps, with an ability to dynamically subset datasets to contextualize user experiments. High quality figures and tables are produced and can be downloaded in multiple formats.