MiNAA Web App

Description

The MiNAA Web App is a wrapper around MiNAA built with R Shiny for the purpose of simplifying and enhancing user interaction with it. When complete, this app will be live at https://minaa.wid.wisc.edu.

MiNAA is a standalone program which aligns a pair of given networks on the basis of their topological and biological data. Follow the instructions in MiNAA's Repository to run MiNAA locally in the terminal.

Installation and Running Locally

Prerequisites

Ensure you have the following installed before running the app:

• R (version 4.0 or later) – Download R
• RStudio (optional but recommended) – Download RStudio
• Git (for cloning the repository)

1. Clone the Repository

Open a terminal or command prompt and run:

git clone https://github.com/solislemuslab/minaa-webapp.git
cd minaa-webapp

2. Compile MiNAA

The Shiny app requires a compiled executable of MiNAA (minaa.exe) in the root of the project directory. The compilation process varies by operating system. See MiNAA's README for more information.

3. Install Dependencies

Before running the application, install the required R packages by executing the following command in RStudio or an R session:

install.packages(c(
  "shiny", "shinyWidgets", "shinyBS", "shinythemes", "shinycssloaders",
  "colourpicker", "jpeg", "png", "igraph", "plotly", "htmlwidgets", "webshot"
))

4. Run the Shiny App Locally

Once dependencies are installed, launch the app by running:

shiny::runApp()

5. Access the Web App

Once the app starts, it will automatically open in your default web browser at: http://127.0.0.1:4165/

If the app does not open automatically, copy and paste the address into your browser.

Contributions, Questions, Issues, and Feedback

Users interested in expanding functionalities in the MiNAA Web App are welcome to do so. Issues reports are encouraged through Github's issue tracker. See details on how to contribute and report issues in CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

The MiNAA Web App is licensed under the MIT licence. © SolisLemus lab projects (2025)

Citation

If you use MiNAA in your work, we kindly ask that you cite the following paper:

@ARTICLE{Nelson2022,
  title         = "MiNAA: Microbiome Network Alignment Algorithm",
  author        = "Nelson, Reed and Aghdam, Rosa and
                   Solis-Lemus, Claudia",
  year          =  2022,
  archivePrefix = "arXiv",
  primaryClass  = "q-bio.PE",
  eprint        = "xxx"
}

Acknowledgments

Some components of this web app were inspired by R Studio's Shiny Examples.