SUMMARY: GREAT (Genomic Regions Enrichment of Annotations Tool) is a widely used tool for functional enrichment on genomic regions. However, as an online tool, it has limitations of outdated annotation data, small numbers of supported organisms and gene set collections, and not being extensible for users. Here, we developed a new R/Bioconductorpackage named rGREAT which implements the GREAT algorithm locally. rGREAT by default supports more than 600 organisms and a large number of gene set collections, as well as self-provided gene sets and organisms from users. Additionally, it implements a general method for dealing with background regions. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The package rGREAT is freely available from the Bioconductor project: https://bioconductor.org/packages/rGREAT/. The development version is available at https://github.com/jokergoo/rGREAT. Gene Ontology gene sets for more than 600 organisms retrieved from Ensembl BioMart are presented in an R package BioMartGOGeneSets which is available at https://github.com/jokergoo/BioMartGOGeneSets. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Consensus partitioning is an unsupervised method widely used in high-throughput data analysis for revealing subgroups and assigning stability for the classification. However, standard consensus partitioning procedures are weak for identifying large numbers of stable subgroups. There are two major issues. First, subgroups with small differences are difficult to be separated if they are simultaneously detected with subgroups with large differences. Second, stability of classification generally decreases as the number of subgroups increases. In this work, we proposed a new strategy to solve these two issues by applying consensus partitioning in a hierarchical procedure. We demonstrated hierarchical consensus partitioning can be efficient to reveal more meaningful subgroups. We also tested the performance of hierarchical consensus partitioning on revealing a great number of subgroups with a large deoxyribonucleic acid methylation dataset. The hierarchical consensus partitioning is implemented in the R package cola with comprehensive functionalities for analysis and visualization. It can also automate the analysis only with a minimum of two lines of code, which generates a detailed HTML report containing the complete analysis. The cola package is available at https://bioconductor.org/packages/cola/.

SUMMARY: Spiral layout has two major advantages for data visualization. First, it is able to visualize data with long axes, which greatly improves the resolution of visualization. Second, it is efficient for time series data to reveal periodic patterns. Here, we present the R package spiralize that provides a general solution for visualizing data on spirals. spiralize implements numerous graphics functions so that self-defined high-level graphics can be easily implemented by users. The flexibility and power of spiralize are demonstrated by five examples from real-world datasets. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The spiralize package and documentations are freely available at the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=spiralize. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

SUMMARY: Heatmap is a powerful visualization method on two-dimensional data to reveal patterns shared by subsets of rows and columns. In this work, we introduce a new R package InteractiveComplexHeatmap that brings interactivity to the widely used ComplexHeatmap package. InteractiveComplexHeatmap is designed with an easy-to-use interface where static complex heatmaps can be directly exported to an interactive Shiny web application only with one additional line of code. InteractiveComplexHeatmap also provides flexible functionalities for integrating interactive heatmap widgets to build more complex and customized Shiny web applications. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The InteractiveComplexHeatmap package and documentations are freely available from the Bioconductor project: https://bioconductor.org/packages/InteractiveComplexHeatmap/. A complete and printer-friendly version of the documentation can also be found in Supplementary File S1. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

SUMMARY: Numerous R packages have been developed for bioinformatics analysis in the last decade and dependencies among packages have become critical issues to consider. In this work, we proposed a new metric named dependency heaviness that measures the number of dependencies that a parent uniquely brings to a package and we proposed possible solutions for reducing the complexity of dependencies by optimizing the use of heavy parents. We implemented the metric in a new R package pkgndep which provides an intuitive way for dependency heaviness analysis. Based on pkgndep, we additionally performed a global analysis of dependency heaviness on CRAN and Bioconductor ecosystems and we revealed top packages that have significant contributions of high dependency heaviness to their child packages. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The package pkgndep and documentations are freely available from the Comprehensive R Archive Network https://cran.r-project.org/package=pkgndep. The dependency heaviness analysis for all 22 076 CRAN and Bioconductor packages retrieved on June 8, 2022 are available at https://pkgndep.github.io/. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.