Introduction: Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) experiments generate complex multi-dimensional data sets that require specialist data analysis tools.
Objective: Here we describe tools to facilitate analysis of the ionome composed of high-throughput elemental profiling data.
Methods: IonFlow is a Galaxy tool written in R for ionomics data analysis and is freely accessible at https://github.com/wanchanglin/ionflow . It is designed as a pipeline that can process raw data to enable exploration and interpretation using multivariate statistical techniques and network-based algorithms, including principal components analysis, hierarchical clustering, relevance network extraction and analysis, and gene set enrichment analysis.
Results and conclusion: The pipeline is described and tested on two benchmark data sets of the haploid S. Cerevisiae ionome and of the human HeLa cell ionome.
Keywords: Galaxy platform; Ionomics; Network biology.
© 2021. The Author(s).