An atlas of the body

To understand biomolecules in context, researchers need to know where they are expressed and what they do in healthy tissues. But with roughly 37 trillion cells in a healthy human body, that knowledge can be hard to come by. One of numerous projects tackling this subject, the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP), released its first tranche of results in July.

The hundreds of researchers in the HuBMAP consortium aim to map out the body at single-cell resolution by conducting spatial surveys of the biomolecules in every organ. In three articles published in Nature, they report on such surveys in the intestine, kidney, skin and placenta-endometrium junction.

Researchers used spatial transcriptomics, proteomics, chromatin accessibility sequencing, multiplexed immunofluorescence and other techniques to identify what they term neighborhoods within each tissue, where different types of cells live together. In many cases, they could collect several types of data from the same individual cell.

Additional articles in other Nature family journals describe new imaging techniques the consortium is developing, as well as the team’s approach to organizing and presenting terabytes of experimental data.

HuBMAP investigators collaborate with similar consortia such as the Human Cell Atlas, and the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative but are more focused on how single cells fit into three-dimensional tissues, they explained in a press conference.

As the team accumulates more data, they hope to construct a set of anatomical coordinates, “like a latitude-longitude system for the healthy human body,” says Katy Börner of Indiana University, one of HuBMAP’s principal investigators. They also intend to collect more data on how aging alters healthy tissue.