6533b85dfe1ef96bd12bf29c

RESEARCH PRODUCT

A novel community driven software for functional enrichment analysis of extracellular vesicles data

subject

description

Bioinformatics tools are imperative for the in depth analysis of heterogeneous high-throughput data. Most of the software tools are developed by specific laboratories or groups or companies wherein they are designed to perform the required analysis for the group. However, such software tools may fail to capture "what the community needs in a tool". Here, we describe a novel community-driven approach to build a comprehensive functional enrichment analysis tool. Using the existing FunRich tool as a template, we invited researchers to request additional features and/or changes. Remarkably, with the enthusiastic participation of the community, we were able to implement 90% of the requested features. FunRich enables plugin for extracellular vesicles wherein users can download and analyse data from Vesiclepedia database. By involving researchers early through community needs software development, we believe that comprehensive analysis tools can be developed in various scientific disciplines. We would like to thank Tejaswee P. Shah for her valuable input in the development of FunRich. We would like to thank Jan Lotvall for helping us in this effort by circulating the email within his group. We thanks many other users who requested for features/changes in FunRich though the e-mail and the online forum. Suresh Mathivanan is supported by Australian Research Council DECRA (DE150101777) and Award U54- DA036134 supported by the NIH Common Fund through the Office of Strategic Coordination/Office of the NIH Director.The funders had no role in study design, data collection andanalysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Sí