easyMF: A Web Platform for Matrix Factorization-based Biological Discovery from Large-scale Transcriptome Data

With the development of high-throughput experimental technologies, large-scale RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) data have been and continue to be produced, but have led to challenges in extracting relevant biological knowledge hidden in the produced high-dimensional gene expression matrices. Here, we present easyMF, a user-friendly web platform that aims to facilitate biological discovery from large-scale transcriptome data through matrix factorization (MF). The easyMF platform enables users with little bioinformatics experience to streamline transcriptome analysis from raw reads to gene expression and to decompose expression matrix from thousands of genes to a handful of metagenes. easyMF also offers a series of functional modules for metagene-based exploratory analysis with an emphasis on functional gene discovery. As a modular, containerized and open-source platform, easyMF can be customized to satisfy users’ specific demands and deployed as a web server for broad applications. easyMF is freely available at https://github.com/cma2015/easyMF. We demonstrated the application of easyMF with four case studies using 940 RNA sequencing datasets from maize (Zea mays L.).