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Rapid Release Inventory

Current Version:

  • Release Title: Rapid Release Inventory
  • Release Date: 2026-05-11
  • Release Version: BICAN-2026-01-RR-SCO
7
institutions
457
donors
3,204
specimens
27
data collections

About

The BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) is committed to rapid data sharing to increase the accessibility and impact of data generated by its members. Through a federated pipeline for metadata collection, sequencing, and data processing, BICAN enables unpublished data that has completed basic quality control to be made available to the research community.

This release features three core components:

  1. Data ingest pipelines integrated with specimen and sequencing data management at NIMP and the NeMO data archive.
  2. A dedicated BICAN program page in the Data Catalog including a dashboard overview of BICAN data.
  3. A BICAN rapid release project page and specimen viewer. 

Release Organization

This Rapid Release Inventory includes single-cell transcriptomic, epigenomic, and multiomic data generated by participating BICAN awardees. At the project-level, the inventory supports search across shared features common to all single cell data. 

Data is further packaged into 27 “collections” of files available individually through the Neuroscience Multi-omic Archive (NeMO); each collection is grouped by technique, species, grant, participating laboratory, and data use restriction. 

Navigating the Release

Use the BICAN Data Catalog to explore what is included in the release, or go directly to the NeMO Data Archive to access released data files.

BICAN Data Catalog

Hosted in the Brain Knowledge Platform, the BICAN Data Catalog provides the main visual entry point for this release. Users can explore dashboards, featured projects, project pages, and a specimen browser that supports navigation by donor or library aliquot.

NeMO Data Archive

The NeMO Data Archive provides access to the released data files. Files associated with this release are available in metacollection nemo:col-ow59b0f, with supporting documentation provided alongside the archive collection.

Additional metadata and provenance in NIMP

NIMP Analytics provides additional specimen metadata and tissue provenance information using the specimen NHASH IDs included in this release. It also supports deeper exploration through resource visualizations, a terminology browser, and the consortium’s joint sampling plan by tissue.

General Licensing and Usage Guidelines

Data in this release are provided under different licenses. Users should review the Data Catalog collection entries and the README file available for download alongside specimen and file manifests for the applicable license for each dataset. 

In general, non-human datasets are made available under a CC-BY-4.0 license. Human data derived from tissue consented for open access are provided under BICAN-BY-NR. Human controlled access data is shared on approval and subject to consent restrictions - see the NeMO documentation on access controls for further information.

When reusing data, please provide attribution to the data generators by citing the appropriate data citation. Data citations can be found with the collection at the NeMO archive or in the Data Catalog collection entries. 

Release Documentation

Contributors

Data in the rapid release were generated by multiple laboratories as part of the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network. New to this release are collections of multi-modal human data from the Luo lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, developmental mouse data from the Arlotta lab at Harvard University, and multi-modal data from lemur, mole-rat, and pig-tailed macaque from the Allen Institute (Lein). This release also has updates to existing collections including developmental mouse data from the Allen Institute (Zeng) and University of California, San Francisco (Nowakowski), cross-species data from the Allen Institute (Lein), marmoset data from Princeton University (Krienen), as well as human transcriptome data from the Broad Institute (McCarroll) and epigenomic data from the Salk Institute (Ecker). The NIH grant awards contributing to data in this initial release are shown below. 

Data Contributors:

Award Principal Investigators Title
U01MH130962 Paola Arlotta, Tomasz Nowakowski, Hongkui Zeng Comprehensive single-cell atlas of the developing mouse brain
UM1MH130966 Steven McCarroll, Evan Macosko An Atlas of Human Brain Cell Variation
UM1MH130994 Joseph Ecker, Margarita Behrens, Bing Ren, Ting Wang, Xiangmin Xu Center for Multiomic Human Brain Cell Atlas
UM1MH130981 Ed Lein, Hongkui Zeng Functionally guided adult whole brain cell atlas in human and NHP
UM1MH130991 Arnold Kriegstein, Aparna Bhaduri, Hao Huang, Jon Levin, Tomasz Nowakowski, Alexander Pollen, Nenad Sestan A Multidisciplinary Center for Developing Human and Non-human Primate Brain Cell Atlases
U01MH130995 Chongyuan Luo Spatiotemporal epigenomic and chromosomal architectural cell atlas of developing human brains
U01MH130907 Anton Arkhipov, Marina Garrett Bridging Function, Connectivity, and Transcriptomics of Mouse Cortical Neurons

The data ecosystem that supports the rapid release includes three platforms: the Brain Knowledge Platform (BKP; Allen Institute for Brain Science), the Neuroanatomy-anchored Information Management Platform for Collaborative BICAN Data Generation (NIMP, RRID:SCR_024684; The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston) and the fastq file storage at NeMO archive. These integrated platforms will continue to enable regular cross-consortium data releases going forward. 

Metadata and resource identifiers (NHash, RRID:SCR_025313) for specimens and sequencing data are captured, managed, and cross-linked through NIMP (RRID:SCR_024684) for Collaborative BICAN Data Generation, codifying critical BICAN data standards and standard operating processes to ensure trackable experimental workflow and data integrity for down-stream data archives of the entire BICAN consortium.

Single cell omics data processing pipelines were developed by the Broad Data Sciences Platform in partnership with the BICAN community. Pipelines are available on GitHub (RRID:SCR_002630), Dockstore, and the cloud workbench Terra (RRID:SCR_021648) Data operations (including data ingestion, storage, and release) are performed by the Neuroscience Multi-omic (NeMO) Archive team at the University of Maryland.

The following NIH Awards provided infrastructure support for this Rapid Release of single-cell omics data.

Single-cell Omics infrastructure contributors

Award Principal Investigators Title
R24MH114788 Owen White A BRAIN Initiative resource: The neuroscience multi-omic data archive
U24MH130918 Shoaib Mufti, Satrajit Ghosh, Michael Hawrylycz, Lydia Ng An extensible brain knowledge base and toolset spanning modalities for multi-species data-driven cell types
U24MH130919 Michael Hawrylycz, Carol Thompson A Community Resource for Single Cell Data in the Brain
U24MH130968 Timothy Tickle, Jesse Gillis, Owen White Scalable Molecular Pipelines for FAIR and Reusable BICAN Molecular Data
U24MH130988 Guo-Qiang Zhang, Hua Xu, Wenjin Jim Zheng Engagement and outreach to achieve a FAIR data ecosystem for the BICAN


Previous Rapid Releases