Pycea: a scverse toolkit for single-cell lineage tracing analysis
Lineage tracing enables reconstruction of cellular histories in development, regeneration, and disease, but integrating lineage data into single-cell analysis workflows remains challenging. We introduce Pycea, a Python toolkit for lineage analysis and visualization, and TreeData, an extension of AnnData that stores lineage trees alongside cellular measurements. TreeData is compatible with Scanpy and other scverse tools, enabling integrated analysis without converting between formats. Pycea provides scalable methods for tree visualization, clade identification, distance comparisons, ancestral state inference, and lineage statistics. This software is open source and available at https://github.com/YosefLab/pycea.
Authors
- Nir Yosef (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9004-1225)
- Jonathan S. Weissman (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2445-670X)
- William N. Colgan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8328-4672)
- Matthew G. Jones (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0363-4493)
- Luke W. Koblan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2814-4412)
- Eric Weine (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-7809-1649)
Institutions
- Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research (US)
- Weizmann Institute of Science (IL)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
- Published
- 2026-11-01
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.10.30.763227
- Primary Topic
- Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
- Type
- preprint
Funders
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Helen Hay Whitney Foundation
- Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
- National Institutes of Health