UCell and pyUCell: single-cell gene signature scoring for R and Python.

Andreatta, Massimo; Carmona, Santiago J · Bioinformatics · 2026

basic_science · Level V

Where this comes from

Abstract

Gene signature scoring provides a simple yet powerful approach for quantifying biological signals within single-cell omics datasets. UCell and pyUCell offer fast and robust implementations of rank-based signature scoring for R and Python, respectively, integrating seamlessly with leading single-cell analysis ecosystems such as Seurat, Bioconductor, and scanpy/scverse. UCell v2 is distributed as an R package by BioConductor (https://bioconductor.org/packages/UCell/) and as a Python package by pyPI (https://pypi.org/project/pyucell/).

Medical subject headings