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Desktop application (PyQt6) · MIT

Starplast

Gene evidence for Toxoplasma gondii and Plasmodium falciparum in one place.

Starplast brings expression, fitness screens, localization, protein features, interactions and literature annotations together. Use it to look up a gene, investigate hits from a screen, compare groups of genes and choose candidates for follow-up experiments. The bundled maps contain 8,140 T. gondii genes and 5,720 P. falciparum genes, viewed separately.

  • Version 0.54.0
  • Released 2026-10-05
  • Python 3.10 or newer
Install User guide Source code PyPI
Starplast gene map: thousands of points, one per gene, in coloured groups, with lines from one selected gene to related genes
The T. gondii gene map in Starplast's dark and light themes; it follows this page's theme. Each point is a gene; lines link the selected gene to related genes. Screenshots from the Starplast repository (MIT).

What it does

  • Explore a geneSearches identifiers, symbols and descriptions, then shows the source evidence.
  • Predict a traitCompares held-out predictions before making calls for unlabelled genes, keeping related genes in the same evaluation group.
  • Compare a screenJoins a gene-level CSV or TSV to the existing evidence and keeps unresolved identifiers visible.
  • 39 strategiesNamed ways of turning the combined data into a claim, each with a guide and a self-test against shuffled data.

Positions on the map come from an embedding of selected features: nearby genes have similar inputs, which alone does not show a shared function or a physical interaction. Search scores help to prioritise candidates; they are not experimental validation. Gene tables and graphs ship with the package and work offline; 130 registered datasets are listed with their sources in the dataset catalogue.

Explore a screen

  1. Choose the organism under File → Species.
  2. Search for a gene ID. For T. gondii, File → Import data adds your screen results.
  3. Colour and filter the map by the measurements you want to compare.
  4. Click a gene to read its evidence and inspect each type of relationship separately.
  5. Select a group with a lasso or brush, then export the gene list for follow-up.

Install Starplast 0.54.0

PyPI

pip install starplast
starplast

Requires Python >=3.10, a display and OpenGL. Analyses run on the CPU; pip install "starplast[gpu]" adds NVIDIA GPU support on Linux x86-64 with a CUDA 12 driver.

From spaCR

In the spaCR desktop app, the Starplast tile on the Toxoplasma page installs Starplast in its own Python environment and opens it as a separate application (marked alpha in spaCR). To look at spaCR results in Starplast, export a gene-level table from spaCR and import it with File → Import data.

About spaCR