Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2018 Jul 1;17(4):283-294.
doi: 10.1093/bfgp/elx029.

The Human Cell Atlas: Technical approaches and challenges

Chung-Chau Hon  1 , Jay W Shin  1 , Piero Carninci  1 , Michael J T Stubbington  2
Affiliations
Review

The Human Cell Atlas: Technical approaches and challenges

Chung-Chau Hon et al. Brief Funct Genomics. .

Abstract

The Human Cell Atlas is a large, international consortium that aims to identify and describe every cell type in the human body. The comprehensive cellular maps that arise from this ambitious effort have the potential to transform many aspects of fundamental biology and clinical practice. Here, we discuss the technical approaches that could be used today to generate such a resource and also the technical challenges that will be encountered.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Overview of the paths from tissue acquisition to data dissemination in the HCA. scRNAseq protocols act on disaggregated suspensions of cells from human organs with optional stages at which samples may be fixed or otherwise preserved. Spatially resolved methods analyse sections of fixed tissues. The data that are generated must be stored, analysed and disseminated.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Regev A, Teichmann S, Lander ES, et al.The human cell atlas. bioRxiv 2017; doi: 10.1101/121202.
    1. GTEx Consortium. Human genomics. The Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) pilot analysis: multitissue gene regulation in humans. Science 2015;348:648–60. - PMC - PubMed
    1. FANTOM Consortium and the RIKEN PMI and CLST (DGT), Forrest AR, Kawaji H, et al.A promoter-level mammalian expression atlas. Nature 2014;507:462–70. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Gallego Romero I, Pai AA, Tung J, et al.RNA-seq: impact of RNA degradation on transcript quantification. BMC Biol 2014;12:42. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Pozhitkov AE, Neme R, Domazet-Lošo T, et al.Tracing the dynamics of gene transcripts after organismal death. Open Biol 2017;7:160267. - PMC - PubMed

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources