Scientists are trying to create the most detailed 3D map of the human body

Scientists around the world are working together to create the most detailed map of the human body – a map that shows how the body's tissues and organs function and interact with each other at the cellular level.

In 2017, the National Institutes of Health announced that they would launch the Bio-Molecular Human Atlas Program (HuBMAP), a multi-year initiative to develop an "open global framework for comprehensive mapping of human body".

According to the NIH, HuBMAP aims to combine the latest imaging technologies with the advances made in sequencing the types of molecules produced by our body, to create a three-dimensional roadmap of how our cells work.

These molecules include the genetic material contained in most cells – the total sum is known as the genome – but they also include the unique proteins that each cell is programmed to make, as well as the chemical byproducts or metabolites of a cell.

On Wednesday, the agency released the first round of grants to be awarded to research teams from various universities and institutions in the United States and elsewhere. One of these teams will be led by Ziv Bar-Joseph, professor of computational biology and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University.

"We have billions of cells in our body and each cell has a copy of the same DNA, but obviously the brain is doing something different from the heart or our lungs, etc. The difference is in which part of the genome each cell uses, "said Bar-Joseph Gizmodo. "But it's only in recent years that we've been able to look at all the genes, or all of the proteins, or all the components used by each cell."

In many ways, noted Bar-Joseph, the project is the spiritual successor to the human genome project.

"We're moving from 1D to 3D," he said. "It's one of the next steps to truly understand human biology."

In an ideal future, Bar-Joseph said that doctors could use HuBMAP as a giant reference guide, allowing them to identify potential health problems in a person long before the onset of physical symptoms.

Part of the NIH funding will be used to accelerate the technologies that allow us to imagine and sequence the cells of the body in great detail. Other grants will help scientists collect and study the cells and tissues of healthy volunteers who will serve as a human reference for this map. But Bar-Joseph and his team have the task of helping researchers understand the massive data that these experiments will produce.

"If you want to map even a few thousand cells in the brain, that can create hundreds of gigabytes of data. And it's an experience for a place. So, overall, the data for that will be huge – I mean, petabytes, maybe more. And now, the question is: how do you manage this data? "Our team is therefore focused on the IT methods of this project."

This involves not only learning to process, analyze and efficiently extract important information from the data, but also to create interfaces for possible 3D maps that physicians and scientists can easily understand and interact with.

Bar-Joseph's team is not alone in being involved in the Carnegie Mellon project; another group will work on how to store this data and develop the tissue maps from them. The teams are funded by a $ 2 million ($ 2.8 million) grant from the NIH.

It will be until 2025 for the HuBMAP project to reach its final phase, according to the NIH's proposed schedule, but Bar-Joseph hopes that we will see the first results of the mapping in four or five years. NIH plans to spend US $ 54 million ($ 75 million) on HuBMAP over the next four years.

Another privately funded project, the Atlas of Human Cells, is also attempting to catalog all 37.2 billion cells in the body. Earlier this year, researchers from this project published their first set of results detailing the genetics of certain immune cells.