drawProteins: a Bioconductor/R package for reproducible and programmatic generation of protein schematics

Abstract

Protein schematics are valuable for research, teaching and knowledge communication. However, the tools used to automate the process are challenging. The purpose of the drawProteins package is to enable the generation of schematics of proteins in an automated fashion that can integrate with the Bioconductor/R suite of tools for bioinformatics and statistical analysis. Using UniProt accession numbers, the package uses the UniProt API to get the features of the protein from the UniProt database. The features are assembled into a data frame and visualized using adaptations of the ggplot2 package. Visualizations can be customised in many ways including adding additional protein features information from other data frames, altering colors and protein names and adding extra layers using other ggplot2 functions. This can be completed within a script that makes the workflow reproducible and sharable.