Hu, Y., Tattikota, S.G., Liu, Y., Comjean, A., Gao, Y., Forman, C., Kim, G., Rodiger, J., Papatheodorou, I., Dos Santos, G., Mohr, S.E., Perrimon, N. (2021). DRscDB: A single-cell RNA-seq resource for data mining and data comparison across species.  Comput. Struct. Biotechnol. J. 19(): 2018--2026.

FBrf0249044

Research paper

With the advent of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies, there has been a spike in studies involving scRNA-seq of several tissues across diverse species including Drosophila. Although a few databases exist for users to query genes of interest within the scRNA-seq studies, search tools that enable users to find orthologous genes and their cell type-specific expression patterns across species are limited. Here, we built a new search database, DRscDB (https://www.flyrnai.org/tools/single_cell/web/), to address this need. DRscDB serves as a comprehensive repository for published scRNA-seq datasets for Drosophila and relevant datasets from human and other model organisms. DRscDB is based on manual curation of Drosophila scRNA-seq studies of various tissue types and their corresponding analogous tissues in vertebrates including zebrafish, mouse, and human. Of note, our search database provides most of the literature-derived marker genes, thus preserving the original analysis of the published scRNA-seq datasets. Finally, DRscDB serves as a web-based user interface that allows users to mine gene expression data from scRNA-seq studies and perform cell cluster enrichment analyses pertaining to various scRNA-seq studies, both within and across species.

PMC8085783 (PMC) (EuropePMC)