hitsAB

hitsAB is an open-source software package designed to help researchers interpret large lists of hits from high-throughput screening experiments by annotating them with biological context such as gene identifiers, pathways, and disease associations. The project aims to enable rapid prioritization of candidates for follow-up studies through systematic annotation and scoring.

It supports common input formats (CSV, TSV, JSON) and multiple identifier types (gene symbols, Entrez, Ensembl). It retrieves annotations from public databases, caches them locally, and outputs an annotated hit table, enrichment results, and basic visualizations. It is designed to integrate into existing analysis pipelines and emphasizes reproducibility by tracking annotation versions.

The core engine normalizes identifiers, maps hits to curated resources (GO, KEGG, Reactome), and computes enrichment using standard metrics. It offers simple score-based prioritization and optional modules for clustering hits by functional similarity and for network-aware scoring based on protein interaction data.

The project began in 2020 as a collaboration among bioinformatics researchers and is distributed under an open-source license. Documentation and code are available on a public repository, with community contributions welcome. Users should be aware that results depend on the currency of external databases and that very large datasets may require additional computational resources.

See also: high-throughput screening, gene set enrichment analysis, bioinformatics software.