In a massive collaborative effort, researchers have compiled the most complete healthy human cell atlas yet, mapping the positions of more than a million cells across 33 different organs.
This incredible feat forms a comprehensive reference to help us better understand human health, diseases, treatments, and vaccines, with the aim to map every cell type in the human body as part of the international"You can think of it as a Google Maps of the human body," Wellcome Sanger Institute cellular geneticist Sarah Teichmann said during a press conference.
"People often think of the genome as the blueprint of the organism, but that's not really correct. The genome is more of a parts list, because every cell type uses a different set of parts," explained Stanford bioengineer Steve Quake during the press conference. Her study, led by MIT computational biologist Gökcen Eraslan, developed experimental processes to accurately profile more cell types than ever before, to help compile and also search through the atlas.
It uncovered how some cell types resemble each other no matter where in the body they're found, whereas other cell types are extremely different from one another in different tissues.