Insights, opportunities and challenges provided by large cell atlases

TL;DR

This paper reviews the rapid growth of large-scale single-cell atlases, highlighting achievements, current challenges, and future opportunities in data integration and biological discovery across diverse modalities.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the state of large cell atlases, emphasizing the need for advanced computational tools and addressing existing challenges in the field.

Findings

Significant growth in large-scale single-cell datasets.

Existing resources enable new biological insights.

Challenges include data integration and standardization.

Abstract

The field of single-cell biology is growing rapidly and is generating large amounts of data from a variety of species, disease conditions, tissues, and organs. Coordinated efforts such as CZI CELLxGENE, HuBMAP, Broad Institute Single Cell Portal, and DISCO, allow researchers to access large volumes of curated datasets. Although the majority of the data is from scRNAseq experiments, a wide range of other modalities are represented as well. These resources have created an opportunity to build and expand the computational biology ecosystem to develop tools necessary for data reuse, and for extracting novel biological insights. Here, we highlight achievements made so far, areas where further development is needed, and specific challenges that need to be overcome.