Seed: a user-friendly tool for exploring and visualizing microbial community data

SUMMARY: In this article we present Simple Exploration of Ecological Data (Seed), a data exploration tool for microbial communities. Seed is written in R using the Shiny library. This provides access to powerful R-based functions and libraries through a simple user interface. Seed allows users to explore ecological datasets using principal coordinate analyses, scatter plots, bar plots, hierarchal clustering and heatmaps. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Seed is open source and available at https://github.com/danlbek/Seed. CONTACT: danlbek@gmail.com SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.