Science Forum: The Human Cell Atlas
- Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, United States
- Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, United Kingdom
- Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
- Harvard Medical School, United States
- EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, United Kingdom
- University of Zürich, Switzerland
- RIKEN Center for Life Science Technologies, Japan
- MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
- Hubrecht Institute, Netherlands
- Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
- Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, United States
- German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Germany
- Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, Germany
- Takara Bio USA, Inc., United States
- University of Oxford, United Kingdom
- University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
- Newcastle University, United Kingdom
- Stanford University School of Medicine, United States
- University of Oxford, United Kingdom
- University of California, San Francisco, United States
- Allen Institute for Brain Science, United States
- Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
- KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
- Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
- National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, India
- Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, United States
- University of Cape Town, South Africa
- University of Groningen, Netherlands
- Radboud University Medical Center, Netherlands
- Stanford University, United States
- Sloan Kettering Institute, United States
- University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
- Stanford University, United States
- Harvard University, United States
- New York University, United States
- Netherlands Cancer Institute, Netherlands
- University of Texas, United States
- Helmholtz Zentrum München, Germany
- University of California, Berkeley, United States
- King's College London, United Kingdom
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute, United States
- California Institute of Technology, United States
- University of California, Berkeley, United States
Abstract
The recent advent of methods for high-throughput single-cell molecular profiling has catalyzed a growing sense in the scientific community that the time is ripe to complete the 150-year-old effort to identify all cell types in the human body. The Human Cell Atlas Project is an international collaborative effort that aims to define all human cell types in terms of distinctive molecular profiles (such as gene expression profiles) and to connect this information with classical cellular descriptions (such as location and morphology). An open comprehensive reference map of the molecular state of cells in healthy human tissues would propel the systematic study of physiological states, developmental trajectories, regulatory circuitry and interactions of cells, and also provide a framework for understanding cellular dysregulation in human disease. Here we describe the idea, its potential utility, early proofs-of-concept, and some design considerations for the Human Cell Atlas, including a commitment to open data, code, and community.
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Jonathan S Weissman
Funding
The authors declare that there was no funding for this work
Copyright
© 2017, Regev et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Science Forum: The Human Cell Atlas
eLife 6:e27041.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.27041
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