MiBiOmics: an interactive web application for multi-omics data exploration and integration

Abstract

Background: Multi-omics experimental approaches are becoming common practice in biological and medical sciences underlining the need to design new integrative techniques and applications to enable the multi-scale characterization of biological systems. The integrative analysis of heterogeneous datasets generally allows to acquire additional insights and generate novel hypotheses about a given biological system. However, it can become challenging given the often-large size of omics datasets and the diversity of existing techniques. Moreover, visualization tools for interpretation are usually non-accessible to biologists without programming skills. Results: Here, we present MiBiOmics, a web-based and standalone application that facilitates multi-omics data visualization, exploration, integration, and analysis by providing easy access to dedicated and interactive protocols. It implements classical ordination techniques and the inference of omics-based (multilayer) networks to mine complex biological systems, and identify robust biomarkers linked to specific contextual parameters or biological states. Conclusions: MiBiOmics provides easy-access to exploratory ordination techniques and to a network-based approach for integrative multi-omics analyses through an intuitive and interactive interface. MiBiOmics is currently available as a Shiny app at https://shiny-bird.univ-nantes.fr/app/Mibiomics and as a standalone application at https://gitlab.univ-nantes.fr/combi-ls2n/mibiomics.