MHA, an interactive website for scRNA-seq data of male genitourinary development and disease

Abstract

The development of single-cell sequencing technology has expanded the understanding of cell heterogeneity and disease progression in the male genitourinary system. However, complex processing processes and unprofessional analytical annotations limit the daily use and wildly sharing of published datasets. Here, we describe the Male Health Atlas (MHA), an easy-to-operate online visual website focused on the male genitourinary system, allowing researchers to quickly search for expression patterns of one or multiple genes, and dynamic changes of gene expression during tissue development or under pathological states. At present, the MHA includes nine objects, two species, five types of male genitourinary tissues/organs, and 258,777 single-cell profiles. Compared with other single-cell databases, the MHA has the following advantages: (1) It is easy to operate, and users can complete retrieval and output of results within 5 min without any bioinformatics skills; (2) The selection and analysis of data are under professional supervision of researchers in the male genitourinary field; (3) It contains most of the main male-specific organs and will continue to be updated; (4) MHA provides multi-dimensional output patterns, including tSNE/UMAP, violin, and bubble plot output for displaying single or multiple genes. MHA is the first single-cell database website in the field of andrology and male reproduction, providing researchers with scRNA-seq resources and an accessible tool. MHA is freely available at http://malehealthatlas.cn/.