Returns the atlas version changelog as a tibble

Downloads the atlas_versions.parquet registry from the cellNexus metadata store, caches it locally, and returns it as an in-memory tibble. Each row describes one atlas data release and its relationship to a CellxGene Census snapshot.

Usage

get_atlas_versions(cache = tempdir())

Source

Shen et al.,2026

Arguments

cache: Optional character scalar. A local directory used to cache the downloaded parquet file. Defaults to a temporary directory to separate from the main cache directory.

Value

A tibble with columns:

atlas_id: Atlas version identifier, e.g. "cellxgene_2024/0.1.0". Matches the atlas_id column in get_metadata().
census_version: The CellxGene Census snapshot this atlas was built from, e.g. "01-07-2024".
change_type: One of "initial", "patch", "minor", or "major". See ATLAS_VERSIONS.md for the conventions standards.
description: Summary text of what changed in this release.
modified_at: Modification date as a character scalar ("YYYY-MM-DD"). By default use Sys.Date()

Details

The atlas_id column in this table corresponds directly to the atlas_id column returned by get_metadata(), so you can join them to find which Census snapshot any cell in your query came from.

References

Shen, M., Y. Gao, N. Liu, D. Bhuva, M. Milton, J. Henao, J. Andrews, E. Yang, C. Zhan, N. Liu, S. Si, J. W. Hutchison, M. H. Shakeel, M. Morgan, A. T. Papenfuss, J. Iskander, J. M. Polo, and S. Mangiola. "cellNexus: Quality control, annotation, aggregation and analytical layers for the Human Cell Atlas data." bioRxiv (2026). doi:10.64898/2026.04.14.718336.

Examples

get_atlas_versions()
#> ℹ Downloading https://object-store.rc.nectar.org.au/v1/AUTH_06d6e008e3e642da99d806ba3ea629c5/cellNexus-metadata/atlas_versions.parquet to /tmp/RtmpHNRMD2/atlas_versions.parquet
#> # A tibble: 6 × 6
#>   atlas_id          census_version change_type description modified_at container
#>   <chr>             <chr>          <chr>       <chr>       <chr>       <chr>    
#> 1 cellxgene_2024/0… 01-07-2024     initial     Initial re… 2026-03-26  cellNexu…
#> 2 hta_2025/0.1.0    21-10-2025     initial     Initial re… 2026-03-26  cellNexu…
#> 3 cellxgene_2024/0… 01-07-2024     minor       Changed fi… 2026-04-16  cellNexu…
#> 4 cellxgene_2024/0… 01-07-2024     bug         Fixed cell… 2026-04-21  cellNexu…
#> 5 cellxgene_2024/0… 01-07-2024     minor       Updated tr… 2026-05-26  cellNexu…
#> 6 hca_2024/0.4.1    01-07-2024     minor       Updated th… 2026-07-22  cellNexu…