The Curated Cancer Cell Atlas provides a comprehensive characterization of tumors at single-cell resolution
Recent years have seen a rapid proliferation of single-cell cancer studies, yet most of these studies profiled few tumors, limiting their statistical power. Combining data and results across studies holds great promise but also involves various challenges. We recently began to address these challenges by curating a large collection of cancer single-cell RNA-sequencing datasets, leveraging it for systematic analyses of tumor heterogeneity. Here we greatly extend this repository to 124 datasets for over 40 cancer types, together comprising 2,836 samples, with improved data annotations, visualizations and exploration. Using this vast cohort, we generate an updated map of recurrent expression programs in malignant cells and systematically quantify context-dependent gene expression and cell-cycle patterns across cell types and cancer types. These data, annotations and analysis results are all freely available for exploration and download through the Curated Cancer Cell Atlas, a central community resource that opens new avenues in cancer research.
近年来,单细胞癌症研究经历了快速的发展阶段,然而,大多数研究只关注了少数肿瘤样本,这限制了统计效力。综合各研究的数据和结果具有很大的潜力,但也涉及诸多挑战。我们最近开始着手解决这些问题,通过整理大规模的癌症单细胞RNA测序数据集,并利用这些数据进行系统分析肿瘤异质性问题。在此基础上,我们将该数据库扩展至124个数据集,涵盖超过40种癌症类型,总计包含2836个样本。这些数据集经过了更完善的注释、可视化和探索工具的开发。利用这个庞大的样本集合,我们生成了一个更新后的恶性细胞中反复表达程序的分布图,并系统性地量化了不同癌系间受上下文影响的基因表达及细胞周期模式。这些数据、注释信息以及分析结果均通过“Curated Cancer Cell Atlas”这一中央社区资源库免费开放,为研究者提供了探索和下载的可能性,从而促进癌症研究的进一步发展。