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Persistent hindrances to data re-use in single-cell genomics

Rogic, S.; Xiang Yu, X.; Xu, B.; Millett, A.; Sherif, S.; Poirier-Morency, G.; Schwartz, R.; Pavlidis, P.

2025-10-03 genomics
10.1101/2025.10.02.680150 bioRxiv
Show abstract

We report on our experience attempting to re-use published and publicly available single-cell (or single-nucleus) RNA-sequencing studies (scRNA-seq) from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). We screened GEO for human, mouse and rat scRNA-seq studies as potential candidates for inclusion in the Gemma database of re-annotated and re-analyzed transcriptome studies. Using semi-automated and manual curation, we assessed whether GEO datasets included cell-level expression count matrices and cell-type annotations. We found that there are steep challenges to data reuse. Only [~]40% of studies provided readily usable processed count data that could be reliably mapped to GEO metadata, and fewer than 10% included author-provided cell-type annotations. While raw sequencing data were available for the majority of studies, only a small proportion could be re-analyzed automatically without reliance on heuristics. Our findings show that existing practices for single-cell RNA-sequencing data distribution and sharing are insufficient for effective reuse, and highlight the urgent need for repositories to strengthen and enforce submission requirements, particularly for processed data and cell-type annotations.

Published in Scientific Data (predicted rank #1) · training set

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