ScreenMill: A freely available software suite for growth measurement, analysis and visualization of high-throughput screen data

Background: Many high-throughput genomic experiments, such as Synthetic Genetic Array and yeast two-hybrid, use colony growth on solid media as a screen metric. These experiments routinely generate over 100,000 data points, making data analysis a time consuming and painstaking process. Here we describe ScreenMill, a new software suite that automates image analysis and simplifies data review and analysis for high-throughput biological experiments. Results: The ScreenMill, software suite includes three software tools or "engines": an open source Colony Measurement Engine (CM Engine) to quantitate colony growth data from plate images, a web-based Data Review Engine (DR Engine) to validate and analyze quantitative screen data, and a web-based Statistics Visualization Engine (SV Engine) to visualize screen data with statistical information overlaid. The methods and software described here can be applied to any screen in which growth is measured by colony size. In addition, the DR...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: John C. Dittmar, Robert J. D. Reid, Rodney Rothstein
• Keywords: BMCBI 2010, Colony Growth, Engine, SV Engine