MINERVA API and plugins: opening molecular network analysis and visualization to the community

The complexity of molecular networks makes them difficult to navigate and interpret, creating a need for specialized software. MINERVA is a web platform for visualization, exploration and management of molecular networks. Here, we introduce an extension to MINERVA architecture that greatly facilitates the access and use of the stored molecular network data. It allows to incorporate such data in analytical pipelines via a programmatic access interface, and to extend the platform's visual exploration and analytics functionality via plugin architecture. This is possible for any molecular network hosted by the MINERVA platform encoded in well-recognized systems biology formats. To showcase the possibilities of the plugin architecture, we have developed several plugins extending the MINERVA core functionalities. In the article, we demonstrate the plugins for interactive tree traversal of molecular networks, for enrichment analysis and for mapping and visualization of known disease variants or known adverse drug reactions to molecules in the network.