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The functioning of the myriad of cells that compose us is an enormous mystery. A vast new project is changing that – and provides a comprehensive overview of how we live and die
This is one of the little secrets of biology: we do not really know what we are made of. The human genome may have been decoded in 2003, but we still can not list all types of cells in our body.
Everything we do, whether it's moving to thinking, digesting food or sleeping, is based on a wide range of different cells: red blood cells that look like disks, small nerve cells, stretched cells that form our muscles, list is long. These specialized units come together to form our tissues and organs and make us the complex organisms we are. And yet, many of them remain mysterious.
For the first time, we will now draw up a comprehensive inventory – an objective as ambitious as the human genome project that decoded our DNA. The Human Cell Atlas project plans to identify and locate all types of cells we own, revolutionizing our understanding of the body in the same way that early atlases transformed our worldview. The first results already show how this can help us find our way around a healthy body, not to mention the search for new treatments for diseases such as cancer, which occur when cells deteriorate.
"Knowing cells, is knowing life," says Aviv Regev of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "If you do not know which cells are present and if you understand how they work, you can not really say that you understand biology."
Easier to say than to do. For more than 150 years, researchers categorize cells according to all methods: their size and shape, their location …
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