Introducing the HypCCAtlas: a Functional Hypothalamic Atlas of Cell-Cell Communication to understand neuroendocrine regulations.

The HypCCAtlas is a functional communication atlas of hypothalamic cell populations, designed to infer cell–cell interactions in the context of neuroendocrine regulation, particularly in energy balance and reproduction. Built from single-cell RNAseq datasets, the tool estimates functional communication probabilities by integrating multiple layers of information through distinct scores:

1. a cell-cell interaction score reflecting ligand and receptor expression at the source or target populations. To improve the biological relevance, this score was refined by a connectivity score indicating communication plausibility based on neuroanatomical knowledge (i.e., neuronal connectivity, glial distribution, region proximity),
2. an intracellular pathway score indicating activated or inactivated signaling pathways,
3. an intracellular transcription factor score indicating activated or inactivated regulons,
4. an intracellular perturbation score indicating gene sets regulated by specific receptors.

Moreover, our atlas can reveal differences in hypothalamic functional communication between cells originating from animals of different sexes and subjected to various metabolic challenges.

How to use it? Follow this video (add a link) and refer to the FAQ tab
How to cite? Lopez-Rodriguez D, Renard M, Messina A, Langlet F. HypCCAtlas, A Functional Hypothalamic Cell-Cell Communication Atlas.
How to comment? Please send us an email (fanny.langlet@unil.ch and andrea.messina@chuv.ch)