A human adult is made up of trillions of cells invisible to the human eye.
A human adult is made up of trillions of cells invisible to the human eye. And despite modern technology stripping away layers of mystery, our bodies still hide much information from scientists. How cells interact, connect and arrange into tissues and organs has a direct effect on our health.
“Our current ways of overall mapping the human body are limited,” said Jonathan Silverstein, a visiting professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “There’s not enough data right now to address different diseases.”
Silverstein is part of an international cohort of medical scientists that’s creating a new, interactive 3-D map of the human body down to the cellular level, described as “Google Maps for the body.”
The Human BioMolecular Atlas Program—or HuBMAP for short—aims to be an atlas of sorts for medical doctors to help them understand relationships between cell and tissue organization and function, as well as human health. HuBMAP this week released its first batch of data for use by the scientific community and the general public, which can be found at portal.hubmapconsortium.org.
Continue reading at University of Pittsburgh.
Image via HuBMAP.
