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The draft of the Atlas of Human Cells reveals an unknown world inside the body

2022-05-12T21:48:54.489Z


An international consortium analyzes more than 60 million cells one by one and illuminates a microuniverse that goes beyond simple neurons, platelets and red blood cells


A person begins as a single cell, a fertilized egg, which becomes two cells, then four, then eight, and so on, up to more than 30 billion cells.

They all inherit an identical instruction book, that person's unique DNA, but a neuron in the brain is nothing like a red blood cell.

The key is that DNA is like a piano with about 20,000 keys: genes.

The cell will be one thing or another depending on the genes that are activated.

The scientific community knows that a human being is like a musical conservatory with 30 billion rooms with the same piano, but humanity has ignored until now what melody sounds on each keyboard.

An international consortium presents this Thursday the most complete draft of the so-called Atlas of Human Cells.

It is a historic day for science.

The participating researchers, more than two thousand in 83 countries, have already defined the score of some 60 million cells, one by one, explains Aviv Regev, the visionary Israeli biologist who started the project in 2016. “Our mission is to obtain maps reference of all human cells.

This doesn't mean profiling the 30 to 37 trillion cells in an adult, thankfully!

Human cells are found in repeated types, so we have many very similar copies,” says Regev, a researcher on leave from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA).

Children study a few examples of cells at school —neurons, red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets…—, but Regev stresses that “nobody knows” how many types there really are.

“That is why it is so important to create an atlas of human cells.

We didn't know how many genes we had until the Human Genome Project.

This is a similar case”, he reflects.

The Atlas of Human Cells aims to catalog all cell types and their multiple subtypes, but also to locate them precisely in the human body to know the exact architecture of each organ: what we are made of and why diseases arise.

The Spanish immunologist Cecilia Domínguez Conde, born in Trigueros (Huelva) 35 years ago, is among the main authors of the latest results of the atlas, published this Thursday in the journal

Science

.

The researchers describe the detailed profile of more than a million cells.

The novelty is that they do not focus on a specific tissue, but instead present crossed data from 33 organs of the human body, such as the heart, skin and lungs.

Two T cells (in red) attack a cancer cell (in white).NIH

Domínguez Conde's team, from the Wellcome Sanger Institute (Cambridge, United Kingdom), has focused on the cells of the immune system.

In the example of the conservatory, the scientists already knew that classical music plays on the piano of the white blood cells, but now they see that there are subtypes that play Mozart and that some in particular interpret

The Marriage of Figaro

in the liver and change to

The flute magical

when passing through the lungs.

"We have discovered how cells adapt to different environments," summarizes the immunologist, who from June will direct her own laboratory at the Human Technopole, a new research center in Milan (Italy).

“The diversity of cell types within the immune system is absolutely incredible.

Until now, the work had focused on peripheral blood, but now we study the cells in different tissues and we see new mechanisms”, explains Domínguez Conde.

The immunologist recalls that there is a new generation of cancer treatments, the so-called CAR-T, in which white blood cells, of the T lymphocyte type, are extracted from the patient to redesign them in the laboratory through genetic engineering and increase their ability to destroy cancer cells.

“We see that there are groups of cells playing the same tune, some playing a slightly different tune and others playing a completely different genre.

Biology textbooks have traditionally spoken of about 300 cell types in the human body, but the authors of the atlas have found 500 types in the last million cells analyzed.

Understanding this astonishing diversity will make it possible to improve vaccines, increase the efficacy of antitumor therapies, facilitate regenerative medicine and develop new treatments for rare and common diseases, according to biologist Aviv Regev, who now has a management position at US biotech company Genentech.

Israeli biologist Aviv Regev, co-director of the Atlas of Human Cells.MIT

A mutation in a gene can cause a disease, but although all cells share the same DNA, the problem will only appear in cells that have that particular gene activated.

One of the four consortium studies published this Thursday has found surprises.

“We have found many unexpected cells that have active disease-associated genes.

For example, we have observed non-muscle cells, but in muscle tissue, expressing genes that cause rare muscle diseases.

This is important, because if we want to develop treatments we need to know the cells in order to target them”, celebrates Regev.

The Israeli biologist also highlights the possible applications in regenerative medicine, a specialty that tries to rebuild damaged organs using new cells.

“To get it right, we need to generate cells with the right properties.

The atlas is a reference to ensure that the cells generated in the laboratory have the desired characteristics”, says the researcher, who leads the international consortium together with the German biologist Sarah Teichmann, from the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

According to Regev accounts, the project is "halfway" to the goal.

Neuroscientist Rafael Yuste, professor at Columbia University (USA), applauds the draft of the atlas.

“This batch of results is historic.

It is one of the first salvos of what will be a torrent of studies in the next decade that will classify all cell types in the body”, says Yuste, who has not participated in these investigations.

The Spanish neuroscientist was the father of BRAIN, a billion-dollar project sponsored in 2013 by the then US president, Barack Obama, to obtain a map of the human brain.

Yuste is optimistic.

The new technologies, called transcriptomics, allow cells to be placed in narrow channels and trapped one by one in oily droplets, in order to analyze their active genes in a fast, automated and cheap way.

“The first steps of this strategy have been spectacular.

For example, in the United States, the Allen Institute of Brain Sciences has classified all the cells of a part of the cerebral cortex of the mouse, generating for the first time a list of all the types of neurons in an area of ​​the brain”, Yuste illustrates. , who has collaborated on that project.

The professor recalls the father of neuroscience, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who with a rudimentary microscope discovered by himself in 1888 in Barcelona that neurons were individual cells.

Yuste emphasizes that gigantic consortiums are now dealing with the task, such as his BRAIN initiative and the Human Cell Atlas.

“It is a huge effort, but I see it feasible.

And it will have a fundamental impact on science and medicine, since, in the end, everything that the brain, or the body, does, is cooked between types of cells”, ditch.

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Source: elparis

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