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CellConsensus: An agent-curated atlas for automatic cell typing

de Mathelin, A.; Quinn, J.; Tosh, C.; Tansey, W.

2026-08-13 bioinformatics
10.64898/2026.08.07.743503 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Assigning cell types to single-cell and spatial transcriptomic data remains inconsistent because marker gene knowledge is fragmented across thousands of individual studies. Here we present CellConsensus, a cell typing method built on a consensus corpus of marker genes aggregated from curated atlases (2,607 sources) and de novo mining of 1,174 papers. By reconciling overlapping and conflicting marker evidence into a consensus reference, CellConsensus assigns cell type labels that are more accurate and more reproducible than existing marker- and reference-based approaches, while remaining interpretable and applicable across tissues and platforms. CellConsensus is available as an open-source Python package (https://github.com/tansey-lab/cellconsensus), an interactive database (https://cellconsensus.org), and as an agentic MCP server for conversational querying.

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