Getting started

Motivation

Despite the ground-breaking discoveries in genomics, the genomes of most organisms remain black boxes with the function of the majority of genes and gene products still unknown. Moreover, many genes and proteins play roles in multiple biological processes. High-throughput/high-content microscopy-based screening (HT/HCS) provides an increasingly powerful tool to discover and functionally annotate genes and biological pathways, which already led to several important discoveries, like the systematic identification of genes important for mitosis, endocytosis, and other fundamental processes. Specialised large-scale image and data analysis methods are needed to produce phenotypic data, limiting such functional genomic annotation techniques to researchers of groups that possess that expertise. This means that the community at large is limited in their access to data and their ability to further mine it after publication, reducing the impact of the expensive HT/HC screens. Overall, while technical advances led to an explosion in the amount of data being acquired, suitable data handling, visualization and analysis techniques are still lagging behind.

What is Mineotaur?

Here we propose a novel data visualization tool called Mineotaur (http://www.mineotaur.org), which will allow the community to mine further the raw multidimensional feature data and knowledge from published HT/HC screens leading to a better exploitation of experimental results. The user interface allows the members of the community without any computational knowledge to extract meaningful information from the data. The web interface can be used for querying the data and the results are visualized as plots (e.g. scatter plot, histogram) in real-time. The tool is based on a novel data model allowing the visualization and analysis of extremely large amounts of data.

About the documentation

Installation describes how to generate a new Minetaur instance. To use an existing Mineotaur instance, see Using the web interface. Those who want to understand the technical aspects of Mineotaur better or would like to contribute to it, go to Developing Mineotaur.