This research article introducing the Cell Marker Accordion, a new computational platform designed to improve the interpretation and automatic annotation of single-cell and spatial omics data in both healthy and diseased tissues. The authors highlight that existing tools suffer from inconsistent marker sets and poor interpretability, especially when identifying disease-critical cell populations. The Cell Marker Accordion addresses this by integrating multiple marker gene databases, standardizing nomenclature, and weighting markers based on both their specificity and evidence consistency across sources. Validation studies show that the platform improves annotation accuracy and is faster than previous marker-based tools, demonstrating its utility in identifying aberrant cell types in various pathologies, including acute myeloid leukemia and solid tumors.

References:

• Busarello E, Biancon G, Cimignolo I, et al. Cell Marker Accordion: interpretable single-cell and spatial omics annotation in health and disease[J]. Nature Communications, 2025, 16(1): 5399.