The Human Cell Atlas is a project to describe all

cell Cell most often refers to: * Cell (biology), the functional basic unit of life Cell may also refer to: Locations * Monastic cell, a small room, hut, or cave in which a religious recluse lives, alternatively the small precursor of a monastery ...

types in the human body. The initiative was announced by a consortium after its inaugural meeting in

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

in October 2016, which established the first phase of the project. Aviv Regev and

Sarah Teichmann Sarah Amalia Teichmann (born 1975) is a German scientist who is head of cellular genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and a visiting research group leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). She serves as director of rese ...

defined the goals of the project at that meeting, which was convened by the

Broad Institute The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (IPA: , pronunciation respelling: ), often referred to as the Broad Institute, is a biomedical and genomic research center located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The institu ...

, the

Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute The Wellcome Sanger Institute, previously known as The Sanger Centre and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, is a non-profit British genomics and genetics research institute, primarily funded by the Wellcome Trust. It is located on the Wellcome G ...

and

Wellcome Trust The Wellcome Trust is a charitable foundation focused on health research based in London, in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1936 with legacies from the pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome (founder of one of the predecessors of Glaxo ...

. Regev and Teichmann lead the project.

Description

The Human Cell Atlas will catalogue a cell based on several criteria, specifically the

cell type A cell type is a classification used to identify cells that share morphological or phenotypical features. A multicellular organism may contain cells of a number of widely differing and specialized cell types, such as muscle cells and skin cell ...

, its state, its location in the body, the transitions it undergoes, and its lineage. It will gather data from existing research, and integrate it with data collected in future research projects. Among the data it will collect is the fluxome,

genome In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding g ...

metabolome The metabolome refers to the complete set of Small molecule, small-molecule chemicals found within a biological sample. The biological sample can be a Cell (biology), cell, a cellular organelle, an Organ (anatomy), organ, a Tissue (biology), tiss ...

proteome The proteome is the entire set of proteins that is, or can be, expressed by a genome, cell, tissue, or organism at a certain time. It is the set of expressed proteins in a given type of cell or organism, at a given time, under defined conditions. ...

, and

transcriptome The transcriptome is the set of all RNA transcripts, including coding and non-coding, in an individual or a population of cells. The term can also sometimes be used to refer to all RNAs, or just mRNA, depending on the particular experiment. The t ...

. 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. All aspects of the project will be made "available to the public for free", including software and results. By April 2018, the project included more than 480 researchers conducting 185 projects.

Funding

In October 2017, the

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is an organization established and owned by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan with an investment of 99 percent of the couple's wealth from their Facebook shares over their lifet ...

announced funding for 38 projects related to the Human Cell Atlas. Among them was a grant of undisclosed value to the Zuckerman Institute of the

Columbia University Medical Center NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center (NYP/CUIMC), also known as the Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC), is an academic medical center and the largest campus of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. It includes C ...

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

. The grant, titled "A strategy for mapping the human spinal cord with single cell resolution", will fund research to identify and catalogue

gene In biology, the word gene (from , ; "... Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word gene to describe the Mendelian units of heredity..." meaning ''generation'' or ''birth'' or ''gender'') can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a b ...

activity in all

spinal cord The spinal cord is a long, thin, tubular structure made up of nervous tissue, which extends from the medulla oblongata in the brainstem to the lumbar region of the vertebral column (backbone). The backbone encloses the central canal of the sp ...

cells. 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. Project home pages are available from https://www.czbiohub.org/tabula-projects/. The program is also backed by

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been de ...

, the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

in the United States, and the Manton Foundation.

Data

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 Cord blood (umbilical cord blood) is blood that remains in the placenta and in the attached umbilical cord after childbirth. Cord blood is collected because it contains stem cells, which can be used to treat hematopoietic and genetic disorders s ...

. A research program at the

Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics The Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics (German: ''Max-Planck-Institut für Immunbiologie und Epigenetik'') in Freiburg, Germany is an interdisciplinary research institute that conducts basic research in modern immunobiology, dev ...

published an atlas of the cells of the

liver The liver is a major organ only found in vertebrates which performs many essential biological functions such as detoxification of the organism, and the synthesis of proteins and biochemicals necessary for digestion and growth. In humans, it ...

, using single-cell RNA sequencing on 10,000 normal cells obtained from nine donors. Th
Tabula Sapeins
data was published on a dedicated website

Notes

References

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External links

* * * * * * *{{Cite magazine, url=https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/10/a-google-maps-for-the-human-body/504002/, title=A Google Maps for the human body, last=Yong, first=Ed, magazine=

The Atlantic ''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...

, date=14 October 2016, access-date=4 October 2017 Biological databases Proteomics Online databases