colocr: An R package for conducting co-localization analysis on fluorescence microscopy images

Background: The co-localization analysis of fluorescence microscopy images is a widely used tech- nique in biological research. It is often used to determine the co-distribution of two proteins inside the cell, suggesting that these two proteins could be functionally or physically associated. The limiting step in conducting microscopy image analysis in a graphical interface tool is the selection of the regions of interest for the co-localization of two proteins. Implementation This package provides a simple straight forward workflow for loading fluorescence images, choosing regions of interest and calculating co-localization statistics. Included in the package is a shiny app that can be invoked locally to select the regions of interest where two proteins are interactively co-localized. Availability colocr is available on the comprehensive R archive network, and the source code is available on GitHub as part of the ROpenSci collection, https://github.com/ropensci/colocr . Keywords: R package, co-localization, image-analysis, fluorescence microscopy, statistics