gcplyr: an R package for microbial growth curve data analysis

Abstract

Background

Characterization of microbial growth is of both fundamental and applied interest. Modern platforms can automate collection of high-throughput microbial growth curves, necessitating the development of computational tools to handle and analyze these data to produce insights.

Results

To address this need, here I present a newly-developed R package: gcplyr. gcplyr can flexibly import growth curve data in common tabular formats, and reshapes it under a tidy framework that is flexible and extendable, enabling users to design custom analyses or plot data with popular visualization packages. gcplyr can also incorporate metadata and generate or import experimental designs to merge with data. Finally, gcplyr carries out model-free (non-parametric) analyses. These analyses do not require mathematical assumptions about microbial growth dynamics, and gcplyr is able to extract a broad range of important traits, including growth rate, doubling time, lag time, maximum density and carrying capacity, diauxie, area under the curve, extinction time, and more.

Conclusions

gcplyr makes scripted analyses of growth curve data in R straightforward, streamlines common data wrangling and analysis steps, and easily integrates with common visualization and statistical analyses.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12859-024-05817-3.