Revealing the Critical Regulators of Cell Identity in the Mouse Cell Atlas

Summary: Recent progress in single-cell technologies has enabled the identification of all major cell types in mouse. However, for most cell types, the regulatory mechanism underlying their identity remains poorly understood. By computational analysis of the recently published mouse cell atlas data, we have identified 202 regulons whose activities are highly variable across different cell types, and more importantly, predicted a small set of essential regulators for each major cell type in mouse. Systematic validation by automated literature and data mining provides strong additional support for our predictions. Thus, these predictions serve as a valuable resource that would be useful for the broad biological community. Finally, we have built a user-friendly, interactive web portal to enable users to navigate this mouse cell network atlas. : Suo et al. create a mouse cell network atlas by computational analysis of previously published single-cell RNA-seq data. They predict essential regulators for all major cell types in mouse and develop an interactive web portal for query and visualization. Keywords: single-cell RNA-seq, gene regulatory network, co-expression analysis, text mining, transcription factor, cell type, mouse cell atlas, database, web application, visualizatio