We’re a group of scientists representing the Human Cell Atlas, an international team effort to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells—the fundamental units of life—as a basis for understanding human health as well as diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease. Ask us anything!

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Our bodies have 37 trillion cells. And for decades, scientists have been sorting them into buckets of different types, such as neurons, skin cells, liver cells and so on. However, we still don’t have a comprehensive understanding of the cell types in our bodies. Without this knowledge, it’s impossible to know which cells express the genes involved in a particular disease—and thus, to fully understand these diseases and develop effective and safe treatments for them.

But completing the quest for a complete “periodic table of cells” is suddenly within reach. New, powerful sequencing and imaging techniques allow us to determine which genes are expressed in each of tens of millions of individual cells —and we have accompanying big data algorithms to analyze the data they generate. Suddenly, it is possible to comprehensively map the cells in our bodies.

A large and growing international team of 632 scientists from 47 countries—the Human Cell Atlas consortium—has come together to make this a reality and build an open “Google Maps of the human body,” as an ultimate reference for human biology. Because this team will be making its data openly available, researchers worldwide will be able to zoom in on this Google Map to the level of molecules and zoom out to the level of entire tissues and organs. Our team includes physicians, computer scientists, biologists, organ experts, technologists, software engineers, cell biologists and more, and they’re collaborating in 238 projects across 22 human tissues.

We’re doing this AMA as part of the National Human Genome Research Institute’s celebration for National DNA Day, and we’d love to answer your questions about our vision, our science, or anything else you’d like to know about the Human Cell Atlas effort. Ask us anything!

Your hosts today are:

Aviv Regev, Ph.D., Co-chair of the Human Cell Atlas Organizing Committee, Professor of Biology at MIT, Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Chair of the Faculty at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

Dana Pe’er, Ph.D., Chair, Computational and Systems Biology, Sloan Kettering Institute, Director, Gerry Center for Metastasis and Tumor Ecosystems, Co-Chair, Analysis Working Group, Human Cell Atlas

Miriam Merad, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Oncological Sciences, Professor of Medicine, Hematology and Medical Oncology, Immunology Institute Mount Sinai School of Medicine

Orit Rozenblatt-Rosen, Ph.D., Scientific Director of the Klarman Cell Observatory, Associate Director of the Cell Circuits Program, Lead Scientist at the Broad for the Human Cell Atlas Initiative, Institute Scientist

Jane Lee, Administrative Operations Manager to Klarman Cell Observatory and Core Faculty Member and Chair of the Faculty, Aviv Regev, Broad Institute

Jennifer Rood, Ph.D., Senior Development Writer at the Broad Institute

Garry Nolan, Ph.D., Rachford and Carlotta Harris Professor, Microbiology & Immunology, Stanford University School of Medicine

Kerstin Meyer, Ph.D., Principal Staff Scientist, Wellcome Sanger Institute

Henk Stunnenberg, Ph.D., Full Professor and Head of the Department of Molecular Biology, Faculty of Science, Radboud Institute for Molecule Life Sciences

More info here: https://www.humancellatlas.org/

">We’re a group of scientists representing the Human Cell Atlas, an international team effort to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells—the fundamental units of life—as a basis for understanding human health as well as diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease. Ask us anything!