"Cell Atlasing" refers to a novel strategy to characterise cells in tissues at the molecular level in a quantitative manner. The international Human Cell Atlas consortium brings together a community of biologists, clinicians, technologists, physicists, computational scientists, software engineers, and mathematicians to capitalise on drawing together leaders with various biological, technical and computational expertise. The project is based on the aim to define all human cell types in terms of their distinctive patterns of gene expression, physiological states, developmental trajectories, and location. This will pave the way to create a reference map of all human cells as a basis for understanding human health and diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease.

Previous methods for quantifying molecular states of cells included microarray and standard RNA-seq analysis on a tissue section (RNA-seq is a technique to look at the activity of all the genes in a cell). These methods estimate the activity of any given gene by averaging the signal from millions of cells. Given the heterogeneity of cell populations (i.e.how uniform they are), measurement of the mean values of signals overlooks the internal interactions and differences within a cell population that may be crucial for maintaining normal tissue function and facilitating disease progression.

The Sanger Human Cell Atlasing project will adopt various genomic approaches that will provide genome-wide information in a single experiment. This project aims to scale up the single cell genomics and high-throughput highly multiplex spatial gene expression profiling approaches. Coupled with powerful computational methods, this strategy will produce a comprehensive and systematic reference map of human cells, providing a fundamental blueprint of cell states for both basic biological research and clinical practice.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Samples are from the living and the deceased age 0 to 99+ from healthy and diseased individuals.
• All samples will have fully informed consent for use in research.

Exclusion Criteria:

• Samples taken without consent for use in future research
• Samples taken from individuals without the capacity to consent to use in research

Samples are from the living and the deceased age 0 to 99+ from healthy and diseased individuals, to facilitate atlasing of the entire human body.

Samples for this study will be obtained from tissue banks and ethically approved research studies where consent has been taken for use of the samples in future research.

Prospective samples will also be collected via collaborators at NHS sites. This will allow for the collection of all cell types to fulfil the aims of the study. We will provide collaborators with study specific participant information sheets and informed consent forms to recruit potential donors.