Researchers have compiled the most complete healthy human cell atlas yet, mapping the positions of more than a million cells across 33 different organs.
The aim is to map every cell type in the human body as part of the international Human Cell Atlas in order to better understand human health, diseases, treatments, and vaccines.
You can think of it as a map of the human body, according to Sarah Teichmann.
The street maps view of the individual cells and where they sit in tissues is what we aim towards.
Four studies, involving over 2,300 researchers across 83 countries, harnessed improved laboratory technologies and advances in machine learning to map, compare, and dig deeper into life's basic building block: the cell.
They were able to pry out important patterns among the messy biological noise with the help of new algorithms.
People think of the genome as the blueprints of the organisms, but that is not correct. Steve Quake, a bioengineer at the University of California, Berkeley, explained during the press conference that the genome is more of a parts list.
What we have been able to do collectively is help understand and interpret how different parts of the genome are used to define different cell types and createmolecular definitions for all the different cell types.
Thanks to the generosity of tissue donors, we will be able to draw connections between these cells for a more complete, whole-body perspective of our biological processes and the disruptions that lead to diseases.
For example, we can have genetic variations in our genes that are shared by all cells in the body, and yet the disease itself will only manifest in certain tissues, in certain organs, and that will happen based on the genes that the cells actually use.
Her study, led by MIT computational biologist Gökcen Eraslan, developed experimental processes to accurately profile more cell types than ever before.
In our study, we have shown that this approach can generate crucial insights about the role of cells and tissues in many diseases, which will spark new scientific and biomedical inquiries aimed at a shared goal of revolutionizing medicine.
New cell types, patterns in cell communications, tissue specific cell features, and many more have been revealed by the healthy cell atlas.
Experiments such as tests of signaling molecule in organoids confirm the discoveries of the researchers.
The Tabula Sapiens contains the profiles of 400 different cell types obtained from single-cell RNA sequencing of half a million living cells.
It showed how different cell types are in different parts of the body, and how some cell types look the same in different parts of the body.
Many genes have been found behind diseases, but there is still much we don't know about the tissues and environments these genes manifest in. Cell mapping datasets allow researchers to identify tissues and investigate which types of cells are involved in forming a disease.
A healthy cell atlas can reveal where a targeted molecule will be expressed in the body, allowing us to see if there will be toxicity.
The non-human cells that are there, the microbiome, are a function of location, and we took the opportunity to look at that.
There is a rich and complex structure to the species as you move through the intestines.
Our health is dependent on our symbiotic microbes.
The new findings have been described in a collection of papers, and a couple of teams looked for immune cell locations and how they mature from a developmental perspective.
Chenqu Suo and his team discovered a new type of immune cell. The immune system is supposed to be tolerant of our own healthy tissues.
These are just a few examples of the exciting applications of a healthy cell atlas, and there will be even more to discover as experienced and new scientists continue to build on it.
The Human Cell Atlas is committed to include the variation of humans and not just a narrow view of them.
Variation will be the next generation of the Human Cell Atlas.
All of the studies were published in Science.
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