alona: a web server for single-cell RNA-seq analysis

• Published in: Bioinformatics 2020-06, Vol.36 (12), p.3910-3912
• Main Authors: Franzen, O, Bjorkegren, JLM
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Applications Notes; Gene Expression Profiling; Medicin och hälsovetenskap; Sequence Analysis, RNA; Single-Cell Analysis; Software
• ISSN: 1367-4803; 1367-4811; 1460-2059; 1367-4811
• DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa269

Abstract Summary Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is a technology to measure gene expression in single cells. It has enabled discovery of new cell types and established cell type atlases of tissues and organs. The widespread adoption of scRNA-seq has created a need for user-friendly software for data analysis. We have developed a web server, alona that incorporates several of the most popular single-cell analysis algorithms into a flexible pipeline. alona can perform quality filtering, normalization, batch correction, clustering, cell type annotation and differential gene expression analysis. Data are visualized in the web browser using an interface based on JavaScript, allowing the user to query genes of interest and visualize the cluster structure. alona accepts a compressed gene expression matrix and identifies cell clusters with a graph-based clustering strategy. Cell types are identified from a comprehensive collection of marker genes or by specifying a custom set of marker genes. Availability and implementation The service runs at https://alona.panglaodb.se and the Python package can be downloaded from https://oscar-franzen.github.io/adobo/. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.