CASHeart: A database of single cells chromatin accessibility for the human heart

Human heart single-cell chromatin accessibility data reveal the diversity and complexity of heart cells at the epigenomic level, providing a detailed perspective for understanding the molecular mechanisms of heart development, function maintenance, disease occurrence, and therapeutic response. However, the current human heart single-cell chromatin accessibility data are relatively scarce, lacking large-scale, high-quality, and integrated datasets. To facilitate research and utilization, we have established a comprehensive database of human heart single-cell chromatin accessibility data, CASHeart. This database collects sequencing fragment files from publicly available papers, processes and counts data for 212,600 human heart cells, and provides transformed gene activity scores. All data are accessible for browsing and download via the online platform. We demonstrate that the data provided by CASHeart reveal heart cell type heterogeneity more effectively than the original data, aiding in the analysis of differentially accessible chromatin regions and activated genes. Moreover, we show that the incorporation of single-cell chromatin accessibility data and transformed gene activity scores from CASHeart as reference datasets enhances the analysis of heart single-cell epigenomic and transcriptomic data, whereas the unified chromatin accessible regions provided by CASHeart can assist in the study of gene regulation and genetic variation in human cardiac cells.