The Human Cell Atlas is a global consortium that is creating detailed maps of the cells in the human body to transform understanding of health and disease.
The Human Cell Atlas is a global project to describe all cell types in the human body, to understand human health and for diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease.[1] The initiative was announced by a consortium after its inaugural meeting in London in October 2016, which established the first phase of the project.[2][3]Aviv Regev and Sarah Teichmann defined the goals of the project at that meeting,[4] which was convened by the Broad Institute, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Wellcome Trust.[5] Regev and Teichmann lead the project.[6] As of 2024, the project has mapped approximately 62 million human cells into 18 biological networks, which includes cells from vital systems such as the nervous system, lungs, heart, intestine and immune system.[7]
Description
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.[8] It will gather data from existing research, and integrate it with data collected in future research projects.[3] Among the data it will collect is the fluxome, genome, metabolome, proteome, and transcriptome.[3]
Its scope is to categorize the 37 trillion cells[9][citation needed] of the human body to determine which genes each cell expresses by sampling cells from all parts of the body.[10]
All aspects of the project will be made "available to the public for free", including software and results.[11]
By April 2018, the project included more than 480 researchers conducting 185 projects.[12]
Funding
In October 2017, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced funding for 38 projects related to the Human Cell Atlas.[13] Among them was a grant of undisclosed value to the Zuckerman Institute of the Columbia University Medical Center at Columbia University.[11] 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.[11] 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.[13] Project home pages are available at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's website.[14]
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.[12]
Regev, Aviv. "The Human Cell Atlas"(PDF). Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Archived from the original(PDF) on 13 April 2021. Retrieved 1 October 2017.
Regev, Aviv; et al. (Human Cell Atlas Organizing Committee) (2018). "The Human Cell Atlas White Paper". arXiv:1810.05192 [q-bio.TO].
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". bioRxiv10.1101/121202.
