Abstract: Recent advances in technology have enabled the measurement of biomolecular processes, like gene expression, at the cellular level, leading to new insights into cellular biology, development, and disease. The enhanced resolution of the measurements and scale of the datasets generated by these single-cell assays have required rapid advancements in analysis tools and data formats, but the community has not been as quick to develop standards and data sharing best practices. This results in the very rich datasets being underutilized as they aren’t made available in a format to be readily mined for additional insights or other reuse cases, such as data integration.

Lattice is a curation team funded through the Chan Zuckerberg Institute (CZI) Cell Science Program to address some of these issues by facilitating the sharing of single-cell genomic data in a meaningful way, ultimately accelerating scientific discovery. As the curation team for CELLxGENE Discover, an open resource hosting single-cell data, Lattice partners with computational biologists and software engineers at CZI to design standards that enable a myriad of data reuse cases. We collaborate with data contributors, ranging from large consortia to individual labs, to format their datasets to the submission requirements and publish their data in the resource. Lattice provides additional data sharing support for CZI-funded data generators, which fosters relationships that the Lattice curators can leverage towards improved and more comprehensive standards. As the Lattice team migrates from the Genetics Department to their new home in Biomedical Data Sciences, we are excited to explore new collaborations around single-cell genomic data, the design of data and metadata standards, data validation and quality assurance, community resources, and more.

Reading list:

• CZ CELLxGENE Discover: a single-cell data platform for scalable exploration, analysis and modeling of aggregated data: https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkae1142
• Ontology application and use at the ENCODE DCC: https://doi.org/10.1093/database/bav010