Seurat

Seurat may refer to two prominent uses: the French painter Georges Seurat and a widely used software package for single-cell RNA sequencing data analysis.

Georges Pierre Seurat (1859–1891) was a French painter and a founder of pointillism, a technique in which small dots of pure color are juxtaposed to create optical mixtures in the viewer’s eye. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and developed a meticulous approach to composition, color theory, and light. His best-known work, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, exemplifies the method and his interest in spatial harmony and modern urban life. Seurat’s career was brief but influential, helping to shift late-19th-century painting toward systematic, color-based organization and away from broad, painterly brushwork.

In contemporary computational biology, Seurat is also the name of an open-source software package for single-cell RNA sequencing data analysis. The package provides end-to-end workflows for data normalization, scaling, dimensionality reduction (PCA, UMAP, t-SNE), clustering, identification of marker genes, and visualization, as well as methods for integrating multiple datasets. It supports analyses in both R and Python ecosystems and has become widely used in studies aiming to characterize cellular heterogeneity, identify cell types and states, and compare samples across conditions or technologies. Seurat has a large user community and is regularly updated with new features, documentation, and tutorials.