TBtools, a toolkit for biologists integrating various biological data handling tools with a user-friendly interface.

Chen, C., Chen, H., Zhang, Y., Thomas, H.R., Frank, M.H., He, Y., Xia, R. (2020)  “TBtools, a toolkit for biologists integrating various biological data handling tools with a user-friendly interface.” Molecular Plant, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molp.2020.06.009

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 Toolkit for Biologists integrating various biological data handling tools), a stand-alone software with a user-friendly interface. The toolkit incorporates over 130 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.