HemI: a toolkit for illustrating heatmaps

PLoS One. 2014 Nov 5;9(11):e111988. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0111988. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

Recent high-throughput techniques have generated a flood of biological data in all aspects. The transformation and visualization of multi-dimensional and numerical gene or protein expression data in a single heatmap can provide a concise but comprehensive presentation of molecular dynamics under different conditions. In this work, we developed an easy-to-use tool named HemI (Heat map Illustrator), which can visualize either gene or protein expression data in heatmaps. Additionally, the heatmaps can be recolored, rescaled or rotated in a customized manner. In addition, HemI provides multiple clustering strategies for analyzing the data. Publication-quality figures can be exported directly. We propose that HemI can be a useful toolkit for conveniently visualizing and manipulating heatmaps. The stand-alone packages of HemI were implemented in Java and can be accessed at http://hemi.biocuckoo.org/down.php.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Gene Expression Profiling / methods
  • Software*