A Single Cell Gene Expression Atlas of 28 Human Livers

Abstract

The liver is the largest solid organ in the human body and is responsible for a multitude of essential functions for survival. Chronic liver injury affects over 1 billion people worldwide and therapeutic options other than liver transplantation are a critical unmet medical need. Thus, advances in molecular hepatology are essential to facilitate the discovery of new therapeutic targets. Here we describe the aggregation and integration of single cell RNA-sequencing in more than 36,000 cells from 28 human livers reported in five independent studies. Noteworthy, the merged data shows a high degree of overlap, demonstrating the robustness of liver gene expression at single cell level independent of age, gender, liver collection, processing and sequencing methods. Hence, this data allowed us to develop a user-friendly web browser for quick and easy interrogation and comparison of gene expression across a variety of parenchymal and non-parenchymal liver cell populations. Collectively, this study provides the largest human liver transcriptomic single cell atlas accessible for interactive visualization via an open-access web portal to the research community worldwide.