Reacción a "Nature publishes results of the Human Cell Atlas"

The Human Cell Atlas project was born a few years ago as an ambitious international effort to deepen our knowledge of all the cells that make up the human body. After the success of the Human Genome Project at the end of the 20th century, which allowed us to solve (and still solve today) some of the great genetic unknowns about our biology and diseases, there was still a long way to go in the knowledge of how genetics intervenes in the functioning of our cells and tissues. The next logical step on this path is to investigate how these genes are activated, expressed and coordinated to give life and functionality to the cells that make up our bodies.

In this context, the aim of the human cell atlas project is to develop a detailed map of human cells. This map seeks to understand how cells change throughout life, how they alter in the context of disease, how they interact with each other, what makes them different according to organ or tissue, and even to discover hitherto unknown cell types.

This recently published study focuses specifically on the characterisation of the cells that make up our gastrointestinal system, a highly complex and extensive system with an incredible diversity of cell types. It also performs multiple essential functions for the body - from digestion and absorption of nutrients to the body's immune defence - making its characterisation a scientific challenge.

To this end, data from approximately 30 different studies have been collected, integrated and compared to provide a complete picture. This work includes data from both healthy individuals and gastrointestinal pathologies (inflammatory bowel disease, coeliac disease, etc.), which is of great value to the scientific community for several reasons.

Firstly, it highlights the importance of obtaining and analysing samples from healthy individuals. These samples are difficult to obtain, but essential since, in order to understand diseases, we must first define and characterise what health is. This project integrates multiple studies that include samples from healthy individuals, whose data will be accessible to the scientific community, and can be used for comparison with our studies. In addition, it reinforces the findings and creates a network of scientific studies that exponentially increases their power by unifying all available information on knowledge about gastrointestinal cells in a context of ‘normality’.

Moreover, accessing and integrating data from multiple diseases and different parts of the gastrointestinal system allows us to compare them simultaneously and find common patterns between them. This includes the ability to identify new, rare cell types. For example, in this paper they find a cell pattern that matches in metaplasia, inflammatory bowel disease and celiac disease, but not in healthy individuals. This information could be key in the future to identify patients at risk of progression to neoplasia.

In conclusion, thanks to single cell sequencing techniques, we are building a detailed map of gastrointestinal cells and their functions. This advance represents significant progress for the entire scientific community dedicated to the study of intestinal diseases, strengthening our knowledge and opening new possibilities to improve the diagnosis, treatment and evolution of these pathologies.