Shaoxia: a web-based interactive analysis platform for single cell RNA sequencing data

BMC Genomics. 2024 Apr 24;25(1):402. doi: 10.1186/s12864-024-10322-1.

Abstract

Background: In recent years, Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is increasingly accessible to researchers of many fields. However, interpreting its data demands proficiency in multiple programming languages and bioinformatic skills, which limited researchers, without such expertise, exploring information from scRNA-seq data. Therefore, there is a tremendous need to develop easy-to-use software, covering all the aspects of scRNA-seq data analysis.

Results: We proposed a clear analysis framework for scRNA-seq data, which emphasized the fundamental and crucial roles of cell identity annotation, abstracting the analysis process into three stages: upstream analysis, cell annotation and downstream analysis. The framework can equip researchers with a comprehensive understanding of the analysis procedure and facilitate effective data interpretation. Leveraging the developed framework, we engineered Shaoxia, an analysis platform designed to democratize scRNA-seq analysis by accelerating processing through high-performance computing capabilities and offering a user-friendly interface accessible even to wet-lab researchers without programming expertise.

Conclusion: Shaoxia stands as a powerful and user-friendly open-source software for automated scRNA-seq analysis, offering comprehensive functionality for streamlined functional genomics studies. Shaoxia is freely accessible at http://www.shaoxia.cloud , and its source code is publicly available at https://github.com/WiedenWei/shaoxia .

Keywords: Analysis framework; Analysis platform; Pipeline; Single cell RNA sequencing.

MeSH terms

  • Computational Biology / methods
  • Humans
  • Internet
  • RNA-Seq / methods
  • Sequence Analysis, RNA* / methods
  • Single-Cell Analysis* / methods
  • Software*
  • User-Computer Interface