nicocriscuolo/StructuRly: A novel shiny app to produce comprehensive, detailed and interactive plots for population genetic analysis

Population genetics is essential for the analysis of allele variants and frequencies within a group of individuals. Nowadays, these studies are usually carried out using Bayesian clustering algorithms implemented, for example, in software such as STRUCTURE or ADMIXTURE. However, the graphical outputs of this applications are not fully informative. StructuRly 0.1.0 aims to facilitate the visualization of Bayesian analyses results in an interactive way. It has been implemented in R using the Shiny library and it has a user-friendly interface that is simple and intuitive. The user can import his genetic data, perform a hierarchical cluster analysis based on the most used geometric and binary distance measures, and compare its results with the ones obtained from STRUCTURE or ADMIXTURE. In fact, the user can also import the tables obtained after an analysis with these softwares, then visualize and personalize the barplot that shows the admixture index (q) of each sample to every cluster. In addition to being able to zoom and edit the graph, display information by passing the cursor on the samples, the real novelty introduced by StructuRly is the ability to (i) visualize the labels of each sample and (ii) group every label according to the user's initial population, thus obtaining an immediate visual feedback compared to the results obtained from the Bayesian analysis. With StructuRly it is also possible to produce the triangle plot useful for showing more specifically the degree of belonging of a sample to a certain cluster. The charts are interactive and can be downloaded in different formats.

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("nicocriscuolo/StructuRly")