BICAN
The BRAIN Initiative® Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) is a collaborative effort uniting neuroscientists, computational biologists, and software engineers, to create a comprehensive atlas of the human brain. Supported by the U.S. BRAIN Initiative, BICAN awardees are dedicated to transforming our understanding of the brain by gathering and sharing new data that allows us to discover the basic components of the brain, detailing the vast array of neurons and non-neuronal cells across multiple species in adult and in development with an emphasis on how this informs our understanding of the human brain. A core mission of BICAN is to share data, knowledge, and tools with the neuroscience community, including single cell transcriptomics and epigenomics data, spatial transcriptomic assays, and multimodal interrogation of cell type morphology, electrophysiology, and transcriptomic phenotype.
About the Rapid Release Inventory
November 10, 2026 Release
Data Catalog now features the third public release of post-QC single-cell and single-nucleus transcriptomic and epigenomic data from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN), and the first Rapid Release to include processed data files (aligned data, counts, and analysis metrics) from the BICAN common sequencing analysis pipelines. It features data from 9 institutions, totaling 1018 donors, 10248 specimens (library aliquots), and 74 data collections.
The release adds 34 new raw sequencing collections, including human multimodal Paired-Tag data (Ren lab, UC San Diego), mouse locus ceruleus transcriptomic and multimodal data (Cohen lab, Allen Institute), mouse spinal cord multimodal data (Lai lab, UT Southwestern), developmental mouse multimodal data (Arlotta lab, Harvard), mouse neuron and multi-species 10X v4 OCM data (Lein lab, Allen Institute), and new transcriptomic collections from the Krienen (Princeton) and McCarroll (Broad) labs. It also includes 24 new processed datasets generated by 10x Chromium 3' v3.1/v3.1-HT, 10x Chromium 3' v4, 10x Multiome RNA-seq, and snm3C-seq pipelines. Existing collections from the Allen Institute (Zeng, Lein), UCLA (Luo), UCSF (Nowakowski), Salk (Ecker), Broad (McCarroll), Princeton (Krienen), and Harvard (Arlotta) have also been updated.
Metadata and identifiers link the Data Catalog with the Neuroanatomy-anchored Information Management Platform for Collaborative BICAN Data Generation (NIMP) and the NeMO archive, where data files can be accessed. Data are available under a CC-BY license (non-human), a BICAN-BY-NR license (open-access human), and other data use agreements (controlled-access human).
It further expands on the crucial infrastructure that integrates the Data Catalog with the fastq & processed file storage at NeMO archive.
May 11, 2026 Release
The second public release of post-QC data from across the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) is now available in the Data Catalog.
It features data from 7 labs, totaling 457 donors, 3204 specimens (library aliquots), and 27 data collections. This includes developmental mouse data from the Allen Institute (Zeng) & University of California, San Francisco (Nowakowski), cross-species data from the Allen Institute (Lein) & marmoset data from Princeton University (Krienen), as well as multi-modal human data from Broad Institute (McCarroll), University of California, Los Angeles (Luo), and Salk Institute for Biological Studies (Ecker).
It further establishes crucial infrastructure that integrates the Data Catalog with the Neuroanatomy-anchored Information Management Platform for Collaborative BICAN Data Generation (NIMP) and the fastq file storage at NeMO archive.
October 1, 2024 Release
The first public release of post-QC data from across the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) is now available in the Data Catalog.
It features data from 6 labs, totaling 255 donors, 1461 specimens (library aliquots), and 20 data collections. This includes developmental mouse data from the Allen Institute for Brain Science (Zeng) & University of California, San Francisco (Nowakowski), cross-species data from the Allen Institute for Brain Science (Lein) & marmoset data from Princeton University (Krienen), as well as multi-modal human data from Broad Institute (McCarroll) & Salk Institute for Biological Studies (Ecker).
It further establishes crucial infrastructure that integrates the Data Catalog with the Neuroanatomy-anchored Information Management Platform for Collaborative BICAN Data Generation (NIMP) and the fastq file storage at NeMO archive.