To create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells—the fundamental units of life—as a basis for both understanding human health and diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease.
This series of publications, supported by the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN), is published in coordinated issues of Science, Science Advances and Science Translational Medicine.
The BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN) has laid critical groundwork for a Human Brain Cell Atlas by funding transformative initiatives that have developed next-generation technologies to explore the brain and nervous system. These efforts have now produced the first draft cell atlas of the entire brain and a detailed cell atlas of the regions of the cerebral cortex, both contributed here to support the Human Cell Atlas goal to complete a catalog of all of the cell types and subtypes of the human brain and nervous system. You can explore the atlases here.
This package of publications in Science and associated Journals listed below represents the breadth and scope of what is now possible to do in the human and closely-related non-human primate (NHP) brain. See https://www.biccn.org/science/human-and-nhp-cell-atlas for more details. These include a range of studies using single cell genomics (RNA-seq, ATAC-seq, methylation, and spatial transcriptomics) to study cellular organization in adult and developing human and NHP brain, as well as studies of the phenotypic characteristics of neuron types in human brain. The collection of publications also includes Introduction and Perspective articles.