PolyASite v3.0: a multi-species atlas of polyadenylation sites inferred from single-cell RNA-sequencing data

The broadly used 10X Genomics technology for single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) captures RNA 3' ends. Thus, some reads contain part of the non-templated polyadenosine tails, providing direct evidence for the sites of 3' end cleavage and polyadenylation on the respective RNAs. Taking advantage of this property, we recently developed the SCINPAS workflow to infer polyadenylation sites (PASs) from scRNA-seq data. Here, we used this workflow to construct version 3.0 (v3.0, https://polyasite.unibas.ch/) of the PolyASite Atlas from a big compendium of publicly available human, mouse and worm scRNA-seq datasets obtained from healthy tissues. As the resolution of scRNA-seq was too low for robust detection of cell-level differences in PAS usage, we aggregated samples based on their tissue-of-origin to construct tissue-level catalogs of PASs. These provide qualitatively new information about PAS usage, in comparison to the previous PAS catalogs that were based on bulk 3' end sequencing experiments primarily in cell lines. In the new version, we document stringency levels associated with each PAS so that users can balance sensitivity and specificity in their analysis. We also upgraded the integration with the UCSC Genome Browser and developed track hubs conveniently displaying pooled and tissue-specific expression of PASs.