As part of the ongoing Human Cell Atlas project, researchers mapped 1.6 million cells in the gastrointestinal tract. Here’s how they pulled it off — and what it means.
There was a recent flurry of excitement when UK researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, a nonprofit genomics and genetics research organization in Cambridge, England, announced their creation of the most detailed cell map of the human gastrointestinal tract up to this point. Using spatial and single-cell data from 1.
She explained that generating more datasets was not a job for one person and “required convincing a lot of scientists that it was worthwhile,” including a cancer biologist and a mucosal immunologist. They also brought in more technical bioinformatics expertise and recruited an IT team — several people who only worked on processing data and clearing it, “so it was aligned very specifically, and processed very uniformly, across the study,” Elmentaite said.
“The cells that are transcriptionally more similar to each other, they will cluster together. And the ones that are more distinct transcriptionally will be farther away from each other,” Elmentaite said. Epithelial cells are among the most abundant cells in the body. The researchers knew from established research that these cells act a bit like first responders and provide healing to the gut. “We could see that they were producing a lot of mucous that helps to potentially flush down the microbes that are triggering inflammation. But the ‘aha moment’ for us was that actually there’s a dual function in these cells,” she said.
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