Human Cell Atlas
-
Mind boggling.
An ambitious plan to map all 37 trillion cells in the human body is transforming understanding of how our bodies work, scientists report.
The received wisdom said we were built from around 200 types of cell – such as heart muscle or nerve cells.
Instead the Human Cell Atlas project has revealed there are thousands of cell types, with some appearing to be culprits in diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and cystic fibrosis.
In a flurry of announcements, the formation of the human skeleton and the early immune system have also been mapped out in detail.
The novel insight is akin to moving from the maps of the 15th Century era of Joan of Arc and Richard III to what the phone in your pocket can load.
The old maps of the body had the equivalent of major roads and significant geography but also areas cartographers labelled unknown or “terra incognita”.
“[Now] it looks more like a Google map, you have a high resolution view and then on top of that you have the Street View that explains what’s going on, and then on top of that you can see the dynamic changes during the day when less cars are flowing or more cars are flowing,” said Dr Aviv Regev, one of the founders who now works at now at Genentech.
She added: “This is essential for us to understand and treat disease, cells are the basic unit of life, if things go wrong, they go wrong with our cells.”
Performing a feat of “human cartography” requires cutting-edge biology and computer science.
The project so far has looked at more than 100 million cells – deeply analysing each individual one - from 10,000 people around the world.
The journal Nature has now published a series of 40 scientific discoveries as researchers work towards creating the first draft of the whole human cell atlas.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c23829l8kzro?utm_placement=newsletter
