Cell Taxonomy: A Curated Repository of Cell Types with Multifaceted Characterization
With the rapid advances in single-cell sequencing technologies, a reference cell taxonomy is critical for synthesizing growing knowledge of cellular characteristics and dissecting cellular heterogeneity, developmental processes and tumorigenesis at single-cell resolution.Existing resources cover limited species and none of them enable comparison of cell types across species. Besides, multiple evidence-based assessment for cell markers and cell clusters is not adequate in these databases, presenting substantial challenges in cell type delineation.
To address these issues, researchers from the National Genomics Data Center, Beijing Institute of Genomics of Chinese Academy of Sciences (China National Center for Bioinformation) developed Cell Taxonomy. This work was published online in Nucleic Acid Research.
Cell Taxonomy is a comprehensive and curated repository of cell types and associated cell markers encompassing a wide range of species, tissues and conditions. Combined with literature curation and data integration, the current version of Cell Taxonomy establishes a well-structured taxonomy for 3,143 cell types and houses a comprehensive collection of 26,613 associated cell markers in 257 conditions and 387 tissues across 34 species. Based on 4,299 publications and single-cell transcriptomic profiles of ～3.5 million cells, Cell Taxonomy features multifaceted characterization for cell types and cell markers, involving quality assessment of cell markers and cell clusters, cross-species comparison, cell composition of tissues and cellular similarity based on markers. Taken together, Cell Taxonomy represents a fundamentally useful reference to systematically and accurately characterize cell types and thus lays an important foundation for deeply understanding and exploring cellular biology in diverse species.
Schematic overview of the contents and functionalities in Cell Taxonomy. Data are organized and browsed in terms of cell types, cell markers, tissues, species, conditions, studies and publications, and multifaceted cellular characterization is provided (Image by NGDC).
Contact:
Dr. ZHANG zhang
Email: zhangzhang@big.ac.cn
