Database Commons
Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

Database Profile

hECA

General information

URL: http://eca.xglab.tech/#/index
Full name: human Ensemble Cell Atlas
Description: human Ensemble Cell Atlas (hECA) provides a platform for assembling massive scattered single-data into a unified Giant Table (uGT). We keeps exploring information framework and future ways of building and utilizing cell atlas. Here we provide entries for customized in data cell sorting, access to unified Hierarchical Annotation Framework (uHAF) and multifaceted portraits of genes, cell types and organs.
Year founded: 2022
Last update: 2024
Version:
Accessibility:
Accessible
Country/Region: China

Funding support

  • 2021YFF1200900

Classification & Tag

Data type:
RNA
Data object:
Database category:
Major species:
Keywords:

Contact information

University/Institution: Tsinghua University
Address: MOE Key Lab of Bioinformatics, Bioinformatics Division of BNRIST and Department of Automation, Tsinghua University,Beijing 100084, China
City: Beijing
Province/State: Beijing
Country/Region: China
Contact name (PI/Team): Xuegong Zhang
Contact email (PI/Helpdesk): zhangxg@tsinghua.edu.cn

Publications

35602947
hECA: The cell-centric assembly of a cell atlas. [PMID: 35602947]
Chen S, Luo Y, Gao H, Li F, Chen Y, Li J, You R, Hao M, Bian H, Xi X, Li W, Li W, Ye M, Meng Q, Zou Z, Li C, Li H, Zhang Y, Cui Y, Wei L, Chen F, Wang X, Lv H, Hua K, Jiang R, Zhang X.

The accumulation of massive single-cell omics data provides growing resources for building biomolecular atlases of all cells of human organs or the whole body. The true assembly of a cell atlas should be cell-centric rather than file-centric. We developed a unified informatics framework for seamless cell-centric data assembly and built the human Ensemble Cell Atlas (hECA) from scattered data. hECA v1.0 assembled 1,093,299 labeled human cells from 116 published datasets, covering 38 organs and 11 systems. We invented three new methods of atlas applications based on the cell-centric assembly: "in data" cell sorting for targeted data retrieval with customizable logic expressions, "quantitative portraiture" for multi-view representations of biological entities, and customizable reference creation for generating references for automatic annotations. Case studies on agile construction of user-defined sub-atlases and "in data" investigation of CAR-T off-targets in multiple organs showed the great potential enabled by the cell-centric ensemble atlas.

iScience. 2022:25(5) | 26 Citations (from Europe PMC, 2025-12-13)
35942342
Protocol for profiling cell-centric assembled single-cell human transcriptome data in hECA. [PMID: 35942342]
Chen Y, Hao M, Gao H, Li J, Chen S, Li F, Wei L, Zhang X.

Human Ensemble Cell Atlas (hECA) provides a unified informatics framework and the cell-centric-assembled single-cell transcriptome data of 1,093,299 labeled human cells from 116 published datasets. In this protocol, we provide three applications of hECA: "quantitative portraiture" exploration with websites, customizable reference creation for automatic cell type annotation, and "in data" cell sorting with logical conditions. We provide detail steps of connecting to the database, searching cell with conditions, downloading data, and annotating new datasets with customized reference. For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Chen et al. (2022).

STAR Protoc. 2022:3(3) | 4 Citations (from Europe PMC, 2025-12-13)

Ranking

All databases:
1471/6895 (78.68%)
Expression:
288/1347 (78.693%)
1471
Total Rank
28
Citations
9.333
z-index

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Record metadata

Created on: 2024-12-10
Curated by:
Lina Ma [2024-12-11]
Yixin Chen [2024-12-10]