LAB-AID: an interactive web application for visualization of multi-level data from biological experiments

A key step in understanding the results of biological experiments is visualization of the data. Many laboratory experiments contain a range of measurements that exist within a hierarchy of interdependence. An automated and facile way to visualize and interrogate such multi-level data, across many experimental variables, would: 1) lead to improved understanding of the results, 2) help to avoid misleading interpretation of statistics, and 3) easily identify outliers and sources of batch and confounding effects. While many excellent graphing solutions already exist, they are often geared towards the production of publication-ready plots, the analysis of a single variable at a time, require programming expertise, or are unnecessarily complex for the task at hand. Here we present LAB-AID (Laboratory Automated Interrogation of Data), an interactive tool specifically designed to automatically visualize and query hierarchical data resulting from biological experiments