Human Cell Atlas

The Human Cell Atlas is a project to describe all cell types in the human body. The initiative was announced by a consortium after its inaugural meeting in London in October 2016, which established the first phase of the project.^[1][2] Aviv Regev and Sarah Teichmann defined the goals of the project at that meeting,^[3] which was convened by the Broad Institute, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Wellcome Trust.^[4] Regev and Teichmann lead the project.^[5]

Description[edit]

The Human Cell Atlas will catalogue a cell based on several criteria, specifically the cell type, its state, its location in the body, the transitions it undergoes, and its lineage.^[6] It will gather data from existing research, and integrate it with data collected in future research projects.^[2] Among the data it will collect is the fluxome, genome, metabolome, proteome, and transcriptome.^[2]

Its scope is to categorize the 37 trillion cells of the human body to determine which genes each cell expresses by sampling cells from all parts of the body.^[7]

All aspects of the project will be made "available to the public for free", including software and results.^[8]

By April 2018, the project included more than 480 researchers conducting 185 projects.^[9]

Funding[edit]

In October 2017, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced funding for 38 projects related to the Human Cell Atlas.^[10] Among them was a grant of undisclosed value to the Zuckerman Institute of the Columbia University Medical Center at Columbia University.^[8] The grant, titled "A strategy for mapping the human spinal cord with single cell resolution", will fund research to identify and catalogue gene activity in all spinal cord cells.^[8] The Translational Genomics Research Institute received a grant to develop a standard for the "processing and storage of solid tissues for single-cell RNA sequencing", compared to the typical practice of relying on the average of sequencing multiple cells.^[10] Project home pages are available at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's website.^[11]

The program is also backed by European Union, the National Institutes of Health in the United States, and the Manton Foundation.^[7]

Data[edit]

In April 2018, the first data set from the project was released, representing 530,000 immune system cells collected from bone marrow and cord blood.^[9]

A research program at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics published an atlas of the cells of the liver, using single-cell RNA sequencing on 10,000 normal cells obtained from nine donors.^[12]

The Tabula Sapiens data was published on a dedicated website^[13]

See also[edit]

• List of distinct cell types in the adult human body
• ENCODE - Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE)
• Human Genome Project
• Human Protein Atlas
• Human Biomolecular Atlas Program

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• Rozenblatt-Rosen, O.; Stubbington, M.J.T.; Regev, A.; Teichmann, S.A. (18 October 2017). "The Human Cell Atlas: from vision to reality". Nature. 550 (7677): 451–453. Bibcode:2017Natur.550..451R. doi:10.1038/550451a. PMID 29072289. S2CID 205095818.

External links[edit]

• Official website
• Regev A, Teichmann SA, Lander ES, Amit I, Benoist C, Birney E, et al. (Human Cell Atlas Meeting Participants) (8 May 2017). "The Human Cell Atlas". bioRxiv 10.1101/121202.
• Ledford, Heidi (23 February 2017). "The race to map the human body — one cell at a time". Nature. 542 (7642): 404–405. Bibcode:2017Natur.542..404L. doi:10.1038/nature.2017.21508. PMID 28230136.
• Cepelewicz, Jordana (12 July 2017). "Cell Atlases Reveal Biology's Frontiers". Quanta Magazine. Retrieved 1 October 2017.
• "Human Cell Atlas data platform kicks off with support from CZI" (Press release). Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. 1 June 2017. Retrieved 4 October 2017.
• Regev, Aviv (June 2017). "Creating a census of human cells". Nautilus. Retrieved 4 October 2017.
• Yong, Ed (14 October 2016). "A Google Maps for the human body". The Atlantic. Retrieved 4 October 2017.