BioTuring to release a curated database of 5,500,000 cells in BioTuring Single-cell Browser

Today BioTuring Inc. announces its upcoming release of a curated single-cell RNA sequencing database of nearly 5,500,000 cells from 114 publications and projects this September onto BioTuring Single-cell Browser (BBrowser), an interactive and intelligent platform to browse and explore single-cell data.

With this release, the company will double the number of publications indexed in its single-cell browser, currently reaching over 60 studies (making up 4,400,000 cells), crossing the number of cells hosted on available public repositories like Human Cell Atlas (HCA) and Broad Institute Single-cell Portal.

Out of 5.5 million cells, the database covers a broad range of tissues, diseases, and research fields. Among the indexed datasets are valuable comprehensive atlases such as the Mouse Organogenesis Cell Atlas (MOCA) by Cao et al. (2019) and the Tabula Muris dataset (Tabula Muris Consortium, 2017). Notably, the database includes a list of the most comprehensive sets of data in the immune system, especially in the tumor microenvironment, says the atlas of infiltrating T cells in liver cancer (Zheng et al., 2017), breast cancer (Azizi et al. 2018), basal and squamous cell carcinoma (Yost et al., 2019), making a valuable source for reference and meta-analysis in immuno-oncology research.

Not just seeing the dataset and its annotations, in BBrowser, biologists can predict cell types in real-time and run various analysis options, such as marker gene finding, sub-clustering, studying compositional changes, and differential expression analysis. The platform also supports meta-analysis, with multiple methods for batch effect correction to combine studies and pair public studies with in-house projects.

Besides BBrowser, several repositories have been established so far to host single-cell sequencing data. However, most of the available data show up in raw files and different formats, thus requiring quite a lot of processing skills and time to look at. Web portals are also available, yet restrictive in analytics and visualization options. With this constantly increasing database in BBrowser, the company aims to make a comprehensive transcriptomic library of every cell line, and completely remove the barriers to accessing valuable published single-cell data and meta-analysis, enabling transparency in science.

“With a web browser, scientists can easily read published papers; with BioTuring Browser, they can actually “read” the underneath single-cell sequencing data.” said Dr. Son Pham, BioTuring’s Director and Chief Scientist.