About CATION

CATION — the Cell ATlas of ION channels — is a single-cell-resolution map of the complete human ion channelome: 354 curated ion-channel genes across 738 cell types, 58 tissues, and 10.0M cells.

Every ion-channel gene — voltage-gated, ligand-gated, calcium-store, gap-junction, TRP, chloride, HCN — is mapped to where it is expressed in the human body, at single-cell resolution. On top of the expression map, Porecast assigns each of the 738 cell types a bifurcation-defined electrical regime: 536 quiescent / 154 excitable / 48 rhythmic — predicted from the cell's ion-channel fingerprint (external donor-held-out R² 0.416 vs 0.342 expression-only ceiling).

Data sources

Single-cell expression integrated from the CELLxGENE Census LTS 2025-11-08, augmented with four ion-channel-dense external tissues. CATION is a pure reanalysis — no new sequencing. NaN = a gene/cell-type/tissue was not measured; 0.0 = measured zero.

How to explore

Start at the home body explorer — click a tissue to see its regime census and the ion channels Porecast predicts drive it. Search any of the 354 channels on the Gene page, or browse all 738 cell-type regimes on the Regime page.

Citation

CATION — Cell ATlas of ION channels. [Cell, in preparation]. Single-cell data: CZ CELLxGENE Census LTS 2025-11-08. Electrical regimes: Porecast.

Credits & licences

The interactive anatomical body explorer is adapted from the EMBL-EBI Single Cell Expression Atlas organ-anatomogram (Apache-2.0 code; CC BY 4.0 artwork), with ontology IDs from Uberon. CATION is released under a CC BY 4.0 licence.