HOSCA: Human Ocular Single-Cell Atlas for Decoding Ocular Biology and Disease Complexity

The human eye is a highly specialized organ composed of different tissue types, each with a unique cellular microenvironment critical to visual function. Recent advances in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) have provided unprecedented opportunities to explore the cellular heterogeneity of ocular tissues and diseases. However, the rapid accumulation of scRNA-seq data in ophthalmology poses challenges in integrating, aligning, and effectively reusing different datasets. Here, we present the Human Ocular Single-Cell Atlas (HOSCA), an atlas-scale curated database and analysis platform that integrates and harmonizes more than 3.88 million single-cell transcriptomic profiles from 704 human samples and 60 high-quality scRNA-seq datasets, covering 16 anatomical regions of the eye and 15 associated diseases. HOSCA provides user-friendly, interactive tools for conducting cross-tissue, cross-disease, and demographic comparative analyses using a unified bioinformatics pipeline for data standardization, cross-platform batch correction, and accurate cell type annotation. As the largest ocular single-cell resource to date, HOSCA bridges the gap between atlas-scale data and precision ophthalmology, providing a powerful platform for advancing our understanding of ocular biology and disease. HOSCA is publicly available at http://www.bio-data.cn/HOSCA/.