Mutplot: An easy-to-use online tool for plotting complex mutation data with flexibility

With the development of technology, an enormous amount of sequencing data is being generated rapidly. However, transforming this data into patient care is a critical challenge. There are two difficulties: how to integrate functional information into mutation interpretation and how to make the integration easy to apply. One solution is to visualize amino acid changes with protein structure and function in web app platform. There are multiple existing tools for plotting mutations, but the majority of them requires programming skills that are not common background for clinicians or researchers. Furthermore, the recurrent mutations are the focus and the recurrence cutoff varies. Yet, none of the current software offers customer-defined cutoff. Thus, we developed this user-friendly web-based tool, Mutplot (https://bioinformaticstools.shinyapps.io/lollipop/). Mutplot retrieves up-to-date domain information from the protein resource UniProt (https://www.uniprot.org/), integrates the submitted mutation information and produces lollipop diagrams with annotations and highlighted candidates. It offers flexible output options. For data that follows security standards, the app can also be hosted in web servers inside a firewall or computers without internet with Uniprot database stored on them. Altogether, Mutplot is an excellent tool for visualizing protein mutations, especially for clinicians or researchers without any bioinformatics background.