PhosNetVis: a web-based tool for kinase enrichment analysis and interactive 2D/3D network visualizations of phosphoproteomics data

Abstract

Protein phosphorylation is a vital process in cellular signaling that involves the reversible modification of a protein (substrate) residue by another protein (kinase). Advances in liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry have enabled the rapid generation of massive protein phosphorylation datasets across multiple conditions by many research groups. Researchers are then tasked with inferring kinases responsible for changes in phosphorylation sites of each substrate. Despite the recent explosion of tools to infer kinase-substrate interactions (KSIs) from such datasets, these are not optimized for the interactive exploration of the resulting large and complex KSI networks together with significant phosphorylation sites and states. There are also no dedicated tools that streamline kinase inferences together with interactive visualizations of the resulting networks. There is thus an unmet need for a tool that facilitates uster-intuitive analysis, interactive exploration, visualization, and communication of datasets from phosphoproteomics experiments. Here, we present PhosNetVis, a freely available web-based tool for researchers of all computational skill levels to easily infer, generate and interactively explore KSI networks in 2D or 3D by streamlining multiple phosphoproteomics data analysis steps within one single tool. PhostNetVis significantly lowers the barriers for researchers in rapidly generating high-quality visualizations to translate their rich phosphoproteomics datasets into biological and clinical insights.