Efficient pre-processing of Single-cell ATAC-seq data

The primary tool currently used to pre-process 10X Chromium single-cell ATAC-seq data is Cell Ranger, which can take very long to run on standard datasets. To facilitate rapid pre-processing that enables reproducible workflows, we present a suite of tools called scATAK for pre-processing single-cell ATAC-seq data that is 18 times faster than Cell Ranger on human samples, and that uses 33% less RAM when 8 CPU threads are used. Our tool can also calculate chromatin interaction potential matrices, and generate open chromatin signals and interaction traces for cell groups. We demonstrate the utility of scATAK in an exploration of the chromatin regulatory landscape of a healthy adult human brain and show that it can reveal cell-type-specific features. scATAK is available at https://pachterlab.github.io/scATAK/.