simATAC: A Single-cell ATAC-seq Simulation Framework
Single-cell Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin sequencing (scATAC-seq) identifies regulated chromatin accessibility modules at the single-cell resolution. Robust evaluation is critical to the development of scATAC-seq pipelines, which calls for reproducible datasets for benchmarking. We hereby present the simATAC framework, an R package that generates a scATAC-seq count matrix, highly resembling real scATAC-seq datasets in library size, sparsity, and averaged chromatin accessibility signals. simATAC deploys statistical functions derived from analyzing 90 real scATAC-seq cell groups to model read distributions. simATAC provides a robust and systematic approach to generate in silico scATAC-seq samples with cell labels for a comprehensive tool assessment.