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The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Backs Human Cell Atlas Project

We will see some things that we expect, things we know to exist, but I’m sure there will be completely novel things,” says Mike Stubbington, head of the cell atlas team at the Sanger Institute in the U.K., “I think there will be surprises.

Previous attempts at describing cells, from the hairy neurons that populate the brain and spinal cord to the glutinous fat cells of the skin, suggest there are about 300 variations in total. But the true figure is undoubtedly larger.

And the Human Cell Atlas is a collaborative community of world-leading scientists to build an Atlas—a collection of maps that will describe and define the cellular basis of health and disease.

Cells are the most fundamental unit of life, yet we know surprisingly little about them. They vary enormously within the body and express different sets of genes. Without maps of different cell types and where they are located in the body, we cannot describe all their functions and understand the biological networks that direct their activities.

A complete Human Cell Atlas would give us a unique ID card for each cell type, a three-dimensional map of how

cell types work together to form tissues, knowledge of how all body systems are connected, and insights into how changes in the map underlie health and disease. It would allow us to identify which genes associated with the disease are active in our bodies and where, and analyze the regulatory mechanisms that govern the production of different cell types.

This project has now received support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, in the form of it funding 38 pilot projects around the world to help build tools and technologies for the Human Cell Atlas, to accelerate our understanding in key areas—including the brain, immune system, tissue handling & processing, gastrointestinal, skin, and technological development.

The funding will enable the Human Protein Atlas to improve and enhance its open access database, which is used by an estimated 200,000 researchers on a monthly basis.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which was founded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, provides financial and engineering support for the Human Cell Atlas, an ambitious international collaboration that aims to create a reference atlas of all cells in the healthy human body as a resource for studies of health and disease.

Among the other organizations involved in the Human Cell, Atlas project are leaders in single cell analysis, including the Wellcome Trust, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, the Karolinska Institute/SciLifeLab, the Broad Institute, the Sanger Institute and UC Santa Cruz.

KTH and SciLifeLab will now work together with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,” says KTH Associate Professor Emma Lundberg, who leads the Human Protein Atlas’ Cell Atlas project and High Content Microscopy facility at SciLifeLab.

Together, we will integrate our respective technologies,” Lundberg says. As with the Cell Atlas and the Human Protein Atlas, the resulting content will be made open and freely available to other researchers.

We will integrate new technologies such as single-cell RNA sequencing and high multiplex imaging into the spatial data already in Human Protein Atlas,” she says. “This is with the hope that we can draw better conclusions about how human cells are built and create a more informative Human Protein Atlas.

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