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 predicts each cell type's electrophysiology — sag, peak voltage, action-potential rate and four other features — directly from its 354-gene ion-channel expression profile. Validated on 161,145 Patch-seq sweeps from 1,039 mouse visual-cortex neurons (Pearson r up to 0.86, donor-blocked 5-fold cross-validation).

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 explore its ion-channel expression and predicted electrophysiology. Search any of the 354 channels on the Gene page, or see RNA→electrophysiology predictions on the Predictions page.

Citation

CATION — Cell ATlas of ION channels. Single-cell data: CZ CELLxGENE Census LTS 2025-11-08. Electrophysiology predictions: 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.