TBtools - an integrative toolkit developed for interactive analyses of big biological data

The rapid development of high-throughput sequencing (HTS) techniques has led biology into the big-data era. Data analyses using various bioinformatics tools rely on programming and command-line environments, which are challenging and time-consuming for most wet-lab biologists. Here, we present TBtools (a T oolkit for B iologists integrating various biological data handling tools ), a stand-alone software with a user-friendly interface. The toolkit incorporates over 100 functions, which are designed to meet the increasing demand for big-data analyses, ranging from bulk sequence processing to interactive data visualization. A wide variety of graphs can be prepared in TBtools, with a new plotting engine (“JIGplot”) developed to maximum their interactive ability, which allows quick point-and-click modification to almost every graphic feature. TBtools is a platform-independent software that can be run under all operating systems with Java Runtime Environment 1.6 or newer. It is freely available to non-commercial users at https://github.com/CJ-Chen/TBtools/releases .