MS-Helios: A Circos wrapper to visualize multi-omic datasets

Abstract

Background: Advances in high-resolution mass spectrometry facilitate the identification of hundreds of metabolites, thousands of proteins and their post-translational modifications. This remarkable progress poses a challenge to data analysis and visualization, requiring methods to reduce dimensionality and represent the data in a compact way. To provide a more holistic view, we recently introduced circular proteome maps (CPMs). However, the CPM construction requires prior data transformation and extensive knowledge of the Perl-based tool, Circos. Results: We present MS-Helios, an easy to use command line tool with multiple built-in data processing functions, allowing non-expert users to construct CPMs or in general terms circular plots with a non-genomic basis. MS-Helios automatically generates data and configuration files to create high quality and publishable circular plots with Circos. We showcase the software on large-scale multi-omic datasets to visualize global trends and/or to contextualize specific features. Conclusions: MS-Helios provides the means to easily map and visualize multi-omic data in a comprehensive way. The software, datasets, source code, and tutorial are available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/ms-helios/.