useR! 2024

We introduce the R package volcano.view that allows users to create interactive dashboards for proteomics data. Proteomics results are high-dimensional, making interactive dashboards crucial for navigating the thousands of proteins. However, the many data points that need to render also introduced slow load times when using the R package Shiny. We therefore showcase an alternative approach using the JavaScript libraries React and D3. We compared the performance between volcano.view and shiny using Google's Lighthouse tool. The package was developed to visualize results from the SomaScan proteomics assay. The package is organized into modules that can add different functionality. It can include gene set enrichment results, as wells compare results from different studies. Although, the package was developed to be used on proteomics data, it can easily be used more broadly. Although, using React to develop your dashboard is more time consuming and requires more training for data scientists when compared to Shiny. It also offers tools for greatly improving performance. Researchers should be aware of this trade-off between performance and development time.