Cell Guide: Navigate single-cell RNA-seq datasets in your web browser

Cell Guide makes single-cell RNA-seq datasets explorable in the browser — no installation, no coding, and no waiting for a heavyweight app to load. Point it at a dataset and you can immediately scan the UMAP, color it by any gene or metadata field, and read off cluster-level statistics.

I built it because sharing single-cell results usually means either a static figure or a notebook that collaborators can’t easily run. Cell Guide turns a processed dataset into an interactive page that anyone with a link can use, which makes it a convenient companion to a paper or a quick way to look something up. Many research labs use it to share and explore their data.

Try it at https://cell.guide. You can:

• Display metadata on the UMAP figure
• Display gene expression on the UMAP figure
• Aggregate statistics for cell clusters and metadata categories
• Find any gene, instantly
• Browse statistics for every gene

I designed and built Cell Guide end to end — the data preprocessing, the interactive figures, and the interface. It’s open source (live star count below):