Enhort: a platform for deep analysis of genomic positions

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2019 Jun 10:5:e198. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.198. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

The rise of high-throughput methods in genomic research greatly expanded our knowledge about the functionality of the genome. At the same time, the amount of available genomic position data increased massively, e.g., through genome-wide profiling of protein binding, virus integration or DNA methylation. However, there is no specialized software to investigate integration site profiles of virus integration or transcription factor binding sites by correlating the sites with the diversity of available genomic annotations. Here we present Enhort, a user-friendly software tool for relating large sets of genomic positions to a variety of annotations. It functions as a statistics based genome browser, not focused on a single locus but analyzing many genomic positions simultaneously. Enhort provides comprehensive yet easy-to-use methods for statistical analysis, visualization, and the adjustment of background models according to experimental conditions and scientific questions. Enhort is publicly available online at enhort.mni.thm.de and published under GNU General Public License.

Keywords: Data analysis; Genome annotation; Integration profiling; Next-generation sequencing; Virology.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Hessen State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Arts. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.