BCyto: A shiny app for flow cytometry data analysis

Abstract

Flow cytometry (FCM) is a widely used technique to simultaneously measure various characteristics of a cell or particle. Most of reliable software for FCM data analysis are commercially available at high costs. A few R packages are available; however, programming skills are required. In addition, currently, no package offers an interactive user interface (UI) with efficient tools for conventional FCM data analysis. BCyto is an open-source R package/shiny app that allows cell biologists with no coding skills to reliably analyse FCM data in R. BCyto provides intuitive axis transformation for better data visualization, easy visualization of compensation plots and modification of compensation matrices, fast generation of backgating and overlay plots, as well as built-in proliferation and dimensionality reduction tools. BCyto will not only improve accessibility to FCM data analysis but might also serve as an environment for the development of further R-based computational FCM algorithms.

Keywords: Bioinformatics; Cell biology; Data analysis; Flow cytometry; Immunology; Systems biology.