Making SuperPlots in IGOR Pro.
Example | Workflow | Installation
SuperPlots are a way to visualise data in a way that emphasises the experimental reproducibility. You can read more about SuperPlots in the original paper:
Lord, S.J., Velle, K.B., Mullins, R.D. & Fritz-Laylin, L.K. (2020) SuperPlots: Communicating reproducibility and variability in cell biology. J. Cell Biol. 219(6):e202001064
An example SuperPlot generated using SuperPlot.ipf and the test data. Test data is taken from Lord et al. (2020)
Execute using Macros > Make SuperPlot menu item.
Select the three waves that correspond to replicates, treatment/condition, and measurement using the panel.
Click Do It to make your SuperPlot.
The SuperPlot can be customised using the settings on the right of the panel.
- Width controls how wide the each cluster of points is on the x-axis.
- Alpa controls the tranparency of the individual data points. Auto mode lets Igor decide the transparency depending on data density.
- Add bars will add bars to show the mean ± 1 standard deviation to each condition, calculated from the averages of replicates, not from data points. See example above.
- Add stats will add p-values from a t-test for two conditions, or from Dunnett's post-hoc test for three or more conditions (compared to the first condition).
Assemble your data in three waves where each row is a masurement for the entire dataset:
- replicates (numeric wave) indicating which replicate the measurement is from
- condition (text wave) indicating which condition/treatment/group the measurement corresponds to
- measurement (numeric wave) the measurement taken
The waves can be named whatever you like and you can make more than one SuperPlot in an Igor experiment.
Replicates and conditions are converted to numeric and text resepectively and either numeric or text waves can be used as input.
A typical use case would be to make one SuperPlot at a time using the interactive mode described above, however if you want to generate many SuperPlots, programmatically, it is possible to do this using SuperPlotHeadless().
This is intended for advanced users only (which is, let's face it all Igor users!).
Note, there is a current limit of 50 SuperPlots per experiment.
To install, save a copy of SuperPlot.ipf and PXPUtils.ipf to Wavemetrics/Igor Pro 9 User Files/User Procedures
This directory is usually in ~/Documents/
Open SuperPlot.ipf in Igor by double-clicking it from Finder or selecting File > Open File > Procedure in a new Igor experiment.
If the code does not auto-compile, click Macros > Compile
PXPUtils.ipf can be found here.
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This code was developed for IGOR Pro 9. It should work on IP8+.
An R package SuperPlotR is available here.