The collection of highly detailed maps will provide an unprecedented resource for studying health and disease. By driving new technologies for disease diagnosis, and enabling development of new treatments and advances in regenerative medicine, the HCA is likely to facilitate great transformations in healthcare.

HCA data is being made available at the Data Coordination Platform for researchers around the globe. The HCA is committed to creating an open, ethical, equitable and representative atlas for humanity, which will benefit communities worldwide. There are more than 80 HCA scientific publications so far, and you can see our manifesto and White Paper for an overview of the project. With additional rapidly-evolving spatial analysis methods, HCA scientists map these individual cells into precise locations in organs and tissues, and understand their functions and relationships with their neighbors.

This allows scientists to discover new cell types and functions. The HCA is also keen to engage with the public.īy using cutting-edge single cell and spatial genomics and computational techniques, HCA researchers are revealing which of the 20,000 genes in an individual cell are switched on, creating a unique “ID card” for each cell type. Bringing together an international community of biologists, clinicians, technologists, physicists, computational scientists, software engineers, and mathematicians, HCA membership is open to the entire scientific community worldwide – join us here. It is only possible now thanks to global collaboration, technological and computational breakthroughs, and science at great scale.Īn open global initiative, the HCA was founded in 2016 and has grown to more than 2,000 HCA members, from over 1,000 institutes and 75 countries around the world. This enormous undertaking, larger even than the Human Genome Project, will transform our understanding of the 37.2 trillion cells in the human body. The Human Cell Atlas is an international collaborative consortium that charts the cell types in the healthy body, across time from development to adulthood, and eventually to old age. Without maps of different cell types, their molecular characteristics and where they are located in the body, we cannot describe all their functions and understand the networks that direct their activities. If you know of a link which you would recommend adding to this list, please contact the webmaster.Cells are the basic units of life, but we still do not know all the cells of the human body.

Human brain mapping 2017 conference