multiSLIDE: a web server for exploring connected elements of biological pathways in multi-omics data

Abstract Emerging multi-omics experiments pose new challenges for exploration of quantitative data sets. We present multiSLIDE, a web-based interactive tool for simultaneous heatmap visualization of interconnected molecular features in multi-omics data sets. multiSLIDE operates by keyword search for visualizing biologically connected molecular features, such as genes in pathways and Gene Ontologies, offering convenient functionalities to rearrange, filter, and cluster data sets on a web browser in a real time basis. Various built-in querying mechanisms make it adaptable to diverse omics types, and visualizations are fully customizable. We demonstrate the versatility of the tool through three example studies, each of which showcases its applicability to a wide range of multi-omics data sets, ability to visualize the links between molecules at different granularities of measurement units, and the interface to incorporate inter-molecular relationship from external data sources into the visualization. Online and standalone versions of multiSLIDE are available at https://github.com/soumitag/multiSLIDE.