RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Decoupling global biases and local interactions between cell biological variables JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 038059 DO 10.1101/038059 A1 Assaf Zaritsky A1 Uri Obolski A1 Zhuo Gan A1 Carlos R. Reis A1 Zuzana Kadlecova A1 Yi Du A1 Sandra L. Schmid A1 Gaudenz Danuser YR 2017 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/02/14/038059.abstract AB Analysis of coupled variables is a core concept of cell biological inference, with co-localization of two molecules as a proxy for protein interaction being a ubiquitous example. However, external effectors may influence the observed co-localization independently from the local interaction of two proteins. Such global bias, although biologically meaningful, is often neglected when interpreting co-localization. Here, we describe DeBias, a computational method to quantify and decouple global bias from local interactions between variables by modeling the observed co-localization as the cumulative contribution of a global and a local component. We showcase four applications of DeBias in different areas of cell biology, and demonstrate that the global bias encapsulates fundamental mechanistic insight into cellular behavior. The DeBias software package is freely accessible online via a web-server at https://debias.biohpc.swmed.edu.Impact statement: DeBias, a generic method to decompose and quantify the confounding, global factors and direct interactions of pairwise interacting variables.