Amanida: An R package for Meta-analysis of metabolomics non-integral data.

SUMMARY: The combination, analysis and evaluation of different studies which try to answer or solve the same scientific question, also known as a meta-analysis, plays a crucial role in answering relevant clinical relevant questions. Unfortunately, metabolomics studies rarely disclose all the statistical information needed to perform a meta-analysis. Here we present a meta-analysis approach using only the most reported statistical parameters in this field: p-value and fold-change. The p-values are combined via Fisher's method and fold-changes by averaging, both weighted by the study size (n). The amanida package includes several visualization options: a volcano plot for quantitative results, a vote plot for total regulation behaviors (up/down regulations) for each compound, and a explore plot of the vote-counting results with the number of times a compound is found upregulated or downregulated. In this way, it is very easy to detect discrepancies between studies at a first glance. AVAILABILITY: Amanida code and documentation are at CRAN and https://github.com/mariallr/amanida. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary information is available at Bioinformatics online.