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]

Human Cell Atlas
Content
OrganismsHuman
Access
Websitewww.humancellatlas.org

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.[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

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]

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

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.[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.[11]

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

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