1 Introduction

signeRFlow is a shiny app that allows users to explore mutational signatures and exposures to related mutational processes embedded into signeR package. With the available modules, users are able to perform analysis on their own data by applying different approaches, such as de novo and fitting. Also, there is a module to explore public datasets from TCGA.

1.1 Install signeR

In order to use signeRFlow app, you must have signeR package installed. To install signeR, open R and enter:

install.packages("BiocManager")
BiocManager::install("signeR")

1.2 Running shiny app

Start the app using either RStudio or a terminal:

library(signeR)
signeRFlow()

The app will open on a new window or on a tab in your browser.

2 Modules

There are three available modules in the app:

  • signeR de novo: This module provides access to signeR de novo analysis to find signatures in your data, estimating both signatures and related exposures.
  • signeR fitting: This module provides access to signeR fitting analysis to find exposures to known signatures in your data, which can be uploaded or chosen from Cosmic database. Exposures are estimated and can be explored.
  • TCGA explorer: This module provides access to the results of signeR applications to 33 datasets from TCGA.

You can go through the modules independently by using the app sidebar.

2.1 signeR de novo

In this module, you can upload an SNV matrix with counts of mutations and execute the signeR de novo algorithm, which computes a Bayesian approach to the non-negative factorization (NMF) of the mutation counts in a matrix product of mutational signatures and exposures to mutational processes.

You can also provide a file with opportunities that are used as weights for the factorization. Further analysis parameters can be set, results can be visualized on different plots and found signatures can be compared to the ones in Cosmic data