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The QDREC web server: determining dose-response characteristics of complex macroparasites in phenotypic drug screens
Daniel Asarnow1, Liliana Rojo-Arreola1, Brian M Suzuki2
1Department of Computer Science, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA, Department of Pathology and Center for Discovery and Innovation in Parasitic Diseases, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Summary:
Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) caused by helminths constitute some of the most common infections of the world's poorest people. The etiological agents are complex and recalcitrant to standard techniques of molecular biology. Drug screening against helminths has often been phenotypic and typically involves manual description of drug effect and efficacy. A key challenge is to develop automated, quantitative approaches to drug screening against helminth diseases. The quantal dose-response calculator (QDREC) constitutes a significant step in this direction. It can be used to automatically determine quantitative dose-response characteristics and half-maximal effective concentration (EC50) values using image-based readouts from phenotypic screens, thereby allowing rigorous comparisons of the efficacies of drug compounds. QDREC has been developed and validated in the context of drug screening for schistosomiasis, one of the most important NTDs. However, it is equally applicable to general phenotypic screening involving helminths and other complex parasites.
Availability And Implementation:
QDREC is publically available at: http://haddock4.sfsu.edu/qdrec2/. Source code and datasets are at: http://tintin.sfsu.edu/projects/phenotypicAssays.html.
Contact:
rahul@sfsu.edu.
Supplementary Information:
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
