CZI Offer Support for Human Cell Atlas Project

Financial Support for the Human Cell Atlas Project which is using sequencing technology to redefine every cell in the body has been announced by The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). Funding and engineering support from CZI will enable the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) the Broad Institute and the University of California Santa Cruz Genomics Institute (UCSC) to set up an open, cloud-based Data Coordination Platform to check, share and analyse the vast amounts of diverse information generated.

“Anatomy textbooks as they are now were designed by assigning meaning according to how things look and function. Now, we’re using molecular tools to characterise what’s going on in organs and tissues, and to get a deeper view of anatomy. That’s the Human Cell Atlas,” explains Dr John Marioni, Research Group Leader at EMBL-EBI, and EMBL-EBI lead on the Data Coordination Platform steering group.

“The scale of the Atlas will be in the tens of millions of datasets,” says Dr Sarah Teichmann, Head of Cellular Genetics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and joint leader of the Human Cell Atlas. “Interoperability and transparency are essential for keeping so many moving parts working – we know this from our long experience collaborating with one another. We’ve designed the data architecture as open-source and modular from the get-go. That will make it easier for others to use and add to the Atlas in the future.”

“The size and scope of this new data platform will require large-scale collaborations between informatics and genomics experts across academia and industry,” said Cori Bargmann president of science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. “That is why we are thrilled to bring together three of the world’s leading institutions in genomics, informatics, and data sharing to build this important new resource – and our own software engineers will help develop the tools and facilitate the collaboration. It is a great example of how we can help accelerate science by supporting collaborations across institutions and by bringing scientists and engineers together in new ways.”