Scientists Are Trying To Create The Most Detailed 3D Map Of The Human Body Ever

Scientists Are Trying To Create The Most Detailed 3D Map Of The Human Body Ever

Scientists across the world are working together to make the most detailed map of the human body — one that will show how the tissues and organs of the body function and interact with one another on a cellular level.

In 2017, the National Institutes of Health announced it would be launching the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP), a years-long initiative to develop an “open, global framework for comprehensively mapping the human body”.

According to the NIH, HuBMAP is meant to combine the latest imaging technologies with advances in sequencing the types of molecules that our bodies produce and are made of, all to create a three-dimensional road map of how our cells work.

These molecules include the genetic material packed inside most every cell — the sum total of which is known as the genome — but they also include the unique proteins each cell is programmed to make, as well as a cell’s chemical byproducts or metabolites.

On Wednesday, the agency publicised the first set of grants to be given to research teams at various universities and institutions in the US and elsewhere. One of these teams will be led by Ziv Bar-Joseph, a professor of computational biology and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University.

“We have trillions of cells in our bodies, and each cell has a copy of the same DNA, but obviously, the brain does something different than the heart, or our lungs, and so forth. The difference is in what part of the genome each cell is using,” Bar-Joseph told Gizmodo. “But it’s only been the past few years that we’ve been able to look at the set of genes, or the set of proteins, or the set of components that each cell is using.”

In many ways, Bar-Joseph noted, the project is the spiritual successor to the Human Genome Project.

“We’re moving from 1D to 3D,” he said. “This is one of the next steps to really understanding human biology.”

In an ideal future, Bar-Joseph said, doctors would be able to use HuBMAP as a giant reference guide, allowing them to identify potential health problems in a person long before any physical symptoms show up.

Some of the NIH’s funding will be spent on speeding along the technologies that let us image and sequence the body’s cells in fine detail. Other grants will help scientists collect and study the cells and tissues of healthy volunteers who will serve as the baseline, reference humans for this map. But Bar-Joseph and his team are tasked with helping researchers make sense of the massive data 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 that’s one experiment for one location. So overall, the data for this is going to be huge — I mean, petabytes, maybe more. And now the question is, how do you deal with this data?” he said. “So our team is focused on the computational methods of this project.”

That will not only involve learning how to efficiently process, analyse and extract important information from the data, but also creating interfaces for the eventual 3D maps that doctors and scientists can easily understand and interact with.

Bar-Joseph’s team isn’t the only one at Carnegie Mellon to be involved in the project; another group will work on how to store this data and how to develop the tissue maps from it. The teams are funded under a $US2 million ($2.8 million) NIH grant.

It will take until 2025 for the HuBMAP project to reach its final stages, according to the NIH’s proposed timeline, but Bar-Joseph hopes that we’ll be seeing initial mapping results as early as four to five years from now. The NIH expects to spend $US54 million ($75 million) on HuBMAP over the next four years.

Another privately funded project, the Human Cell Atlas, is similarly trying to catalogue all of the body’s 37.2 trillion cells. Earlier this year, researchers from that project released their first set of results, detailing the genetics of certain immune cells.


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.