Phantasus: web-application for visual and interactive gene expression analysis

Transcriptomic profiling became a standard approach to quantify a cell state, which led to accumulation of huge amount of public gene expression datasets. However, both reuse of these datasets or analysis of newly generated ones requires a significant technical expertise. Here we present Phantasus – a user-friendly web-application for interactive gene expression analysis which provide a streamlined access to more than 84000 public gene expression datasets, as well as allows analysis of user-uploaded datasets. Phantasus integrates an intuitive and highly interactive JavaScript-based heatmap interface with an ability to run sophisticated R-based analysis methods. Overall Phantasus allows to go all the way from loading, normalizing and filtering data to doing differential gene expression and downstream analysis. Phantasus can be accessed on-line at https://ctlab.itmo.ru/phantasus or https://artyomovlab.wustl.edu/phantasus or can be installed locally from Bioconductor (https://bioconductor.org/packages/phantasus). Phantasus source code is available at https://github.com/ctlab/phantasus under MIT licence.