PIVOT: Platform for Interactive Analysis and Visualization of Transcriptomics Data

Many R packages have been developed for transcriptome analysis but their use often requires familiarity with R and integrating results of different packages is difficult. Here we present PIVOT, an R-based application with a uniform user interface and graphical data management that allows non-programmers to conveniently access various bioinformatics tools and interactively explore transcriptomics data. PIVOT supports many popular open source packages for transcriptome analysis and provides an extensive set of tools for statistical data manipulations. A graph-based visual interface is used to represent the links between derived datasets, allowing easy tracking of data versions. PIVOT further supports automatic report generation, publication-quality plots, and program/data state saving, such that all analysis can be saved, shared and reproduced.