Seminar
Human Reference Atlas: Mapping the human body at single-cell resolution
- Katy Börner
- Date
- Friday 6 June 2025
- Time
- Series
- CWTS Research Seminars
- Location
- Online only
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The HuBMAP Human Reference Atlas (HRA) effort aims to develop a common coordinate framework (CCF) for the healthy human body, see HRA Portal. An international team of organ experts across 25+ consortia are authoring so called ASCT+B tables that capture the partonomy and typology information for anatomical structures, cell types, and biomarkers used to identify cell types. The ASCT+B tables are used to revise and extend existing CCF-relevant ontologies. In close collaboration with NIAID at NIH, a 3D Reference Object Library was compiled that provides semantically annotated 3D representations of major anatomical structures captured in the ASCT+B tables. The HRA can be extended and explored using several interactive user interfaces: The Registration User Interface (RUI) supports tissue data registration and annotation across 50+ 3D reference organs. The Exploration User Interface (EUI) supports exploration of semantically and spatially explicit data—from the whole body to the single cell level. The Cell Distance Explorer (CDE) computes and visualizes distance distributions between different cells, cell types, and anatomical structures and cell types and morphological features. For an introduction to HuBMAP goals, data, and code visit the Visible Human MOOC (VHMOOC). This talk details how HuBMAP, SenNet, GTEx, and other data is mapped to the HRA and how the HRA can be used to harmonize data at scale in support of precision health and precision medicine.
About the presenter
KATY BÖRNER is the Victor H. Yngve Distinguished Professor of Engineering and Information Science in the Departments of Intelligent Systems Engineering and Information Science, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering; core faculty of the Cognitive Science Program; and founding director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center—all at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. She is a curator of the Mapping Science exhibit and she leads the international Human Reference Atlas effort. She holds an MS in electrical engineering from the University of Technology in Leipzig, and a PhD in computer science from the University of Kaiserslautern. Börner is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Humboldt Research Fellow, an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow, and a Network Society Fellow.
References
- Snyder, Michael P., Shin Lin, Amanda Posgai, et al. 2019. "The human body at cellular resolution: the NIH Human Biomolecular Atlas Program". Nature 574: 187-192. doi: 10.1038/s41586-019-1629-x.
- Börner, Katy, Sarah A Teichmann, Ellen M Quardokus, et al. 2021. "Anatomical structures, cell types and biomarkers of the Human Reference Atlas". Nature Cell Biology 23: 1117-1128. doi: 10.1038/s41556-021-00788-6.
- Jain, Sanjay, Liming Pei, Jeffrey M. Spraggins, et al, HuBMAP Consortium, Katy Börner, and Michael P. Snyder. 2023. "Advances and prospects for the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP)". Nature Cell Biology. doi: 10.1038/s41556-023-01194-w.
- Börner, Katy, Philip Blood, Jonathan C. Silverstein, et al. 2025. "Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP): 3D Human Reference Atlas Construction and Usage". Nature Methods. doi: 10.1038/s41592-024-02563-5