Setup your own

Overview

The UCSC Cell Browser tool set consists of a number of different scripts to help you set up your own. The primary utility being the Python script cbBuild that will import a set of existing single-cell data from a directory of tab-separated files and configuration files to generate a directory of html, json, and css files that can be viewed on the web. The rest of the utilities will produce output than can be fed directly into cbBuild.

The utilities cbSeurat and cbScanpy run a very basic single-cell pipeline on your expression matrix and will output all the files needed to create a cell browser visualization. The cbImport* (cbImportCellranger, cbImportScanpy, etc.) tools convert files produced by Cellranger, Seurat, and Scanpy into a set of files that you can create a Cell Browser visualization from. Both the pipeline and import tools are covered in more detail under their respective sections (With Scanpy, With Seurat, and With Cellranger). There is also a collection of small tools (cbTool) to combine cell annotation files from different pipelines or convert expression matrices.

Using cbBuild to set up a Cell Browser

The main utility for building your own cell browser is cbBuild. It takes in a gene expression matrix and a set related files and converts them JSON and binary files outputting them to directory which can be put onto a web server or used with the built-in webserver. At this time, there is no backend server needed for a cell browser. You can place the output of cbBuild on any static web server at your University or the ones you can rent from companies will do.

After the installation, you should be able to run the cbBuild command and see the usage message:

cbBuild

On your local computer

If you are running the cell browser on your local computer, you will likely need to have cbBuild start up a webserver for you. You can use the -p PORT option to specify on which port the webserver will run:

cbBuild -o ~/public_html/cells/ -p 8888

Pointint your web browser to http://localhost:8888 to view your cell browser. To stop the cbBuild web server, press Ctrl-C. To keep it running in the background, press Ctrl-Z and put it into the background with bg. If you have stopped the web server, you can always run the same cbBuild command to restart it. Restarting the web server will not re-export the entire expression matrix again if there is already one under ~/public_html/cells/my-dataset.

On a webserver

If you are on a webserver, you likely only only want to build the cell browser html files into a web-accessible directory:

cbBuild -o ~/public_html/cells

Specifying the port is optional is you are running this on a server that is already web-accessible. To view your cell browser, navigate to the address for your webserver.

Customizing your cell browser

The example cellbrowser.conf explains all the various settings that are available in this config file. Things you can change include the colors for different metadata attributes, explain cluster acronyms used in your cluster names, add file names, add alternative dimensionality reduction layouts, add more marker gene tables, and more.

One of the most important settings in cellbrowser.conf is the dataset name. When you run cbBuild, the output will be written to OUTPUT_DIR/dataset-name. If you specify the same -o OUTPUT_DIR when running cbBuild for a different dataset with a different dataset name and cellbrowser.conf, the output will be put into a new subdirectory within OUTPUT_DIR. A single cbBuild output directory can contain multiple datasets.