CaSiAn: a Calcium Signaling Analyzer tool

Ca2þ is a central second messenger in eukaryotic cells that regulates many cellular proc- esses. Recently, we have indicated that typical Ca2þ signals are not purely oscillatory as widely assumed, but exhibit stochastic spiking with cell type and pathway specific characteristics. Here, we present the Calcium Signaling Analyzer (CaSiAn), an open source software tool that allows for quantifying these signal characteristics including individual spike properties and time course statis- tics in a semi-automated manner. CaSiAn provides an intuitive graphical user interface allowing experimentalists to easily process a large amount of Ca2þ signals, interactively tune peak detection, revise statistical measures and access the quantified signal properties as excel or text files.