Pan-human Azimuth

Unified and scalable organism-wide cell annotation for single-cell and spatial transcriptomics

Important

The default model version for Pan-human Azimuth has changed to v1 in panhumanpy 1.0.0 and AzimuthAPI 1.0.0.
See the release notes for details.
🐍 Python

Using Python? Start here.

python/panhumanpy.html
📊 R

Using R? Start here.

r/azimuthapi.html
📖 Read the preprint

Out now on bioRxiv!

https://biorxiv.org/content/early/2026/07/21/2026.07.16.738997

The Azimuth project represents a series of computational tools for reference-mapping of single-cell data. As a powerful complement to manual annotation and exploration workflows, reference-mapping pipelines aim to utilize existing knowledge to help automate the annotation and interpretation of new datasets.

We are excited to present Pan-human Azimuth, a neural network classifier that annotates human single-cell and single-nucleus RNA-sequencing experiments—across tissues and technologies—into a consistent and interpretable hierarchical cell typology. The model has been trained on data from 23 different tissues, encompassing 381 different cell types at the highest resolution, organized into a unified hierarchical cell typology based on an adapted version of the DISCO reference.

Pan-human Azimuth is made available through an open-source Python package (panhumanpy) and an R interface (AzimuthAPI), allowing users to annotate their datasets directly. The development of Pan-human Azimuth is led by the New York Genome Center Mapping Component as part of the NIH Human Biomolecular Atlas Project (HuBMAP).

A preprint describing the full methodology is now available on bioRxiv.