IDEA: a web server for Interactive Differential Expression Analysis with R Packages

Differential expression (DE) analysis is a fundamental task in the downstream analysis of the next-generation sequencing (NGS) data. Up to now, a number of R packages have been developed for detecting differentially expressed genes. Although R language has an interaction-oriented programming design, for many biology researchers, a lack of basic programming skills has greatly hindered the application of these R packages. To address this issue, we developed the Interactive Differential Expression Analyzer (IDEA), a Shiny-based web application integrating the differential expression analysis related R packages into a graphical user interface (GUI), allowing users to run the analysis without writing any new code. A wide variety of charts and tables are generated to facilitate the interpretation of the results. In addition, IDEA also provides a combined analysis framework which helps to reconcile any discrepancy from different computational methods. As a public data analysis server, IDAE is implemented in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and is freely available at http://idea.renlab.org.