scRNASequest: an ecosystem of scRNA-seq analysis, visualization, and publishing

BACKGROUND: Single-cell RNA sequencing is a state-of-the-art technology to understand gene expression in complex tissues. With the growing amount of data being generated, the standardization and automation of data analysis are critical to generating hypotheses and discovering biological insights. RESULTS: Here, we present scRNASequest, a semi-automated single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data analysis workflow which allows (1) preprocessing from raw UMI count data, (2) harmonization by one or multiple methods, (3) reference-dataset-based cell type label transfer and embedding projection, (4) multi-sample, multi-condition single-cell level differential gene expression analysis, and (5) seamless integration with cellxgene VIP for visualization and with CellDepot for data hosting and sharing by generating compatible h5ad files. CONCLUSIONS: We developed scRNASequest, an end-to-end pipeline for single-cell RNA-seq data analysis, visualization, and publishing. The source code under MIT open-source license is provided at https://github.com/interactivereport/scRNASequest. We also prepared a bookdown tutorial for the installation and detailed usage of the pipeline: https://interactivereport.github.io/scRNAsequest/tutorial/docs/. Users have the option to run it on a local computer with a Linux/Unix system including MacOS, or interact with SGE/Slurm schedulers on high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12864-023-09332-2.