**Major features:**
* Updated [Arboreto](https://github.com/aertslab/arboreto) release (GRN inference step) includes:
* Support for sparse matrices (using the `--sparse` flag in `pyscenic grn`, or passing a sparse matrix to `grnboost2`/`genie3`).
* Fixes to avoid dask metadata mismatch error
* Updated cisTarget:
* Fix for metadata mismatch in ctx prune2df step
* Support for databases Apache Parquet format
* Faster loading from feather databases
* Bugfix: loading genes from a database (previously missing the last gene name in the database)
* Support for Anndata input and output
* Package updates:
* Upgrade to newer pandas version
* Upgrade to newer numba version
* Upgrade to newer versions of dask, distributed
* Input checks and more descriptive error messages.
* Check that regulons loaded are not empty.
* Bugfixes:
* In the regulons output from the cisTarget step, the gene weights were incorrectly assigned to their respective target genes (PR 254).
* Motif url construction fixed when running ctx without pruning
* Compression of intermediate files in the CLI steps
* Handle loom files with non-standard gene/cell attribute names
* Reformat the genesig gmt input/output
* Fix AUCell output to loom with non-standard loom attributes