PanExplorer: A web-based tool for exploratory analysis and visualization of bacterial pan-genomes

Motivation: As pan-genome approaches are largely employed for bacterial comparative genomics and evolution analyses, but still difficult to be carried out by non-bioinformatician biologists, there is a need for an innovative tool facilitating the exploration of bacterial pan-genomes. Results: PanExplorer is a web application providing various genomic analyses and reports, giving intuitive views that enable a better understanding of bacterial pan-genomes. As an example, we produced the pan-genome for 121 Anaplasmataceae strains (including 30 Ehrlichia, 15 Anaplasma, 68 Wolbachia.) Availability and implementation: PanExplorer is written in Perl CGI and relies on several JavaScript libraries for visualization (hotmap.js, MauveViewer, CircosJS). It is freely available at http://panexplorer.southgreen.fr. The source code has been released in a GitHub repository https://github.com/SouthGreenPlatform/PanExplorer. A documentation section is available on PanExplorer website.