Lung at a Glance: an integrative web toolset of lung ontology, imaging and single cell omics

ABSTRACT

Recent advances in single-cell omics and high-resolution imaging have provided unanticipated data resources for the elucidation of genes underlying the complex biological processes critical for organ formation and function. However, processing and integrating large amounts of single-cell omics and imaging data presents a major challenge for most researchers. There is a critical need for ready-to-use computational tools for data/knowledge integration and visualization. Here we present “Lung-at-a-glance”, an easy-to-use web toolset for visualizing and interoperating complex omics and imaging data, providing an interactive web interface to bridge lung anatomic ontology classifications to lung histology and immunofluorescence confocal images, and cell-type-specific gene expression. “Lung-at-a-glance” contains three interactive components: 1) “Region at a glance”, 2) “Cell at a glance” and 3) “Gene at a glance”. “Lung-at-a-glance” and other newly developed web tools for lung-related data query, integration and visualization are publicly available on LGEA web portal v3 https://research.cchmc.org/pbge/lunggens/mainportal.html.