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Atlas Building Process

HCA's Biological Networks have developed or are developing 'version 1' Integrated Atlases of tissues, organs and systems that make up the human body. To be considered a 'version 1' Atlas, each atlas must meet a set of criteria designed to ensure they are high quality, transparent and reproducible.

All Atlases must:

  1. be robust to technical factors known to affect atlas quality
  2. include data from studies considered to be 'landmarks' in the field
  3. be developed collaboratively with members of the Biological Network
  4. include expert-informed cell annotations
  5. have all data and code accessible, including harmonised metadata

If Atlases meet all of these criteria, they are endorsed by the HCA Organizing Committee and made available on the HCA Data Portal.

As the name suggests, version 1 Atlases are only the starting point. Opportunities exist to increase the biological fidelity of version 1 Atlases by adding more data, expanding the featured data modalities, increasing sample diversity and broadening the anatomical coverage. Future versions of Atlases will build on the 'version 1' Atlases and, over time, will become more comprehensive and integrated.

Atlas Building Stages

The three broad stages of atlas development are:

In progress

Biological Network Coordinators are processing and integrating all of the relevant data and building the Atlas, according to the above stringent criteria.

Endorsed

Biological Network Coordinators have presented the completed Atlas to the HCA Organizing Committee, who have evaluated it against HCA's quality control criteria described above.

Published

A preprint paper describing the Atlas has been published, and the completed Atlas has been released on the HCA Data Portal.

Technical Details

Atlases are products developed by, and in collaboration with, the HCA Community. Thanks to this consultative approach, they benefit from the community's breadth and depth of expertise, with input from cell biologists to clinicians and computer scientists.

At a high level, the steps below describe the workflow commonly followed by teams building HCA version 1 Atlases. Although presented sequentially, Atlas construction is not linear in practice, and the process varies depending on factors like anatomy, available data and prior knowledge. Many activities proceed in parallel and teams frequently revisit earlier decisions as new data or technical challenges emerge. The steps can be divided into three broad phases: Phase I, project set-up; Phase II, data integration; and Phase III, biological inquiry and dissemination.