Human Cell Atlas

The Human Cell Atlas is a global project to describe all cell types in the human body.^[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]

Human Cell Atlas

Content
Description	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.
Organisms	Human
Contact
Primary citation	Regev, Aviv; et al. (Human Cell Atlas Organizing Committee) (2018). "The Human Cell Atlas White Paper". arXiv:1810.05192 [q-bio.TO].
Access
Website	www.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.^[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^{[citation needed]} of the human body to determine which genes each cell expresses by sampling cells from all parts of the body.^[9]

All aspects of the project will be made "available to the public for free", including software and results.^[10]

By April 2018, the project included more than 480 researchers conducting 185 projects.^[11]

Funding

In October 2017, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced funding for 38 projects related to the Human Cell Atlas.^[12] Among them was a grant of undisclosed value to the Zuckerman Institute of the Columbia University Medical Center at Columbia University.^[10] 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.^[10] 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.^[12] Project home pages are available at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's website.^[13]

The program is also backed by European Union, the National Institutes of Health in the United States, and the Manton Foundation.^[9]

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.^[11]

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.^[14]

The Tabula Sapiens data was published on a dedicated website.^[15]

See also

• 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