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Updated: Oct 9, 2025
Droplet Barcoding-Based Single Cell Transcriptomics of Adult Mammalian Tissues
Published on: January 10, 2019
MACA: marker-based automatic cell-type annotation for single-cell expression data
Yang Xu1, Simon J Baumgart1, Christian M Stegmann1
1Bayer-Broad Joint Precision Cardiology Lab, 75 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
Summary:
Accurately identifying cell types is a critical step in single-cell sequencing analyses. Here, we present marker-based automatic cell-type annotation (MACA), a new tool for annotating single-cell transcriptomics datasets. We developed MACA by testing four cell-type scoring methods with two public cell-marker databases as reference in six single-cell studies. MACA compares favorably to four existing marker-based cell-type annotation methods in terms of accuracy and speed. We show that MACA can annotate a large single-nuclei RNA-seq study in minutes on human hearts with ∼290K cells. MACA scales easily to large datasets and can broadly help experts to annotate cell types in single-cell transcriptomics datasets, and we envision MACA provides a new opportunity for integration and standardization of cell-type annotation across multiple datasets.
Availability And Implementation:
MACA is written in python and released under GNU General Public License v3.0. The source code is available at https://github.com/ImXman/MACA.
Supplementary Information:
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
