PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Katy Börner
AU  - Andreas Bueckle
AU  - Bruce W. Herr II
AU  - Leonard E. Cross
AU  - Ellen M. Quardokus
AU  - Elizabeth G. Record
AU  - Yingnan Ju
AU  - Jonathan C. Silverstein
AU  - Kristen M. Browne
AU  - Sanjay Jain
AU  - Clive H. Wasserfall
AU  - Marda L. Jorgensen
AU  - Jeffrey M. Spraggins
AU  - Nathan H. Patterson
AU  - Griffin M. Weber
TI  - Tissue Registration and Exploration User Interfaces in support of a Human Reference Atlas
AID  - 10.1101/2021.12.30.474265
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.12.30.474265
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/12/30/2021.12.30.474265.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/12/30/2021.12.30.474265.full
AB  - Several international consortia are collaborating to construct a human reference atlas, which is a comprehensive, high-resolution, three-dimensional atlas of all the cells in the healthy human body. Laboratories around the world are collecting tissue specimens from donors varying in sex, age, ethnicity, and body mass index. However, integrating and harmonizing tissue data across 20+ organs and more than 15 bulk and spatial single-cell assay types poses diverse challenges. Here we present the software tools and user interfaces developed to annotate (“register”) and explore the collected tissue data. A key part of these tools is a common coordinate framework, which provides standard terminologies and data structures for describing specimens, biological structures, and spatial positions linked to existing ontologies. As of December 2021, the “registration” user interface has been used to harmonize and make publicly available data on 6,178 tissue sections from 2,698 tissue blocks collected by the Human Biomolecular Atlas Program, the Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions program, the Human Cell Atlas, the Kidney Precision Medicine Project, and the Genotype Tissue Expression project. The second “exploration” user interface enables consortia to evaluate data quality and coverage, explore tissue data in the context of the human body, and guide data acquisition.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.