Statistical Analysis and Comprehension of the Human Cell Atlas in R / Bioconductor: Access and Scalable Infrastructure

To provide R / Bioconductor software to provide coherent programmatic interface to the HCA, and to enable scalable interactive statistical analysis of single-cell data.

The Morgan team aimed to develop a programmatic interface to Human Cell Atlas (HCA) data, develop and promote R and Bioconductor approaches to representation and manipulation of on-disk data, and deploy source-agnostic data access patterns to facilitate transition to cloud-scale computing. They developed the HCABrowser package to allow discovery and retrieval of HCA resources from within the R / Bioconductor environment, and the HCAMatrixBrowser for interacting with the HCA Matrix service. Additionally, they developed the LoomExperiment package in Bioconductor for representing large single-cell experiments.