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Joslin researchers to map adipose tissue for Human Cell Atlas Project
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Researchers from Joslin Diabetes Center will partner with more than three dozen collaborative science teams to “map” healthy adipose tissue as part of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative’s Human Cell Atlas Project, according to an institution press release.
Participants in the 3-year Seed Networks projects will focus on mapping specific tissues, such as the heart, eye or liver, in the healthy human body, according to the release. The resulting cellular and molecular maps will serve as a resource for understanding what goes wrong when disease emerges.
The Joslin group will focus on the variety of adipose tissue in healthy humans, profiling so-called brown fat and white fat, via chemical imaging, using single-cell and single-nucleus RNA sequencing from adipocytes and adipocyte precursors with distinct anatomical origins and metabolic function.
“Traditionally, adipose tissue has been misunderstood,” Yu-Hua Tseng, PhD, a senior investigator in the section of integrative physiology and metabolism at Joslin Diabetes Center and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told Endocrine Today. “Most people want to get rid of adipose tissue. Now, we know that adipose tissue is not just a mass storing calories. It is actually important. We now know that adipose tissue can also function as an endocrine organ and communicate with the rest of the body. Not all fat is created equal — there is good fat and bad fat. Brown adipose tissue can burn energy.”
The collaborative groups will bring together scientists, computational biologists, software engineers and physicians to support the continued development of the Human Cell Atlas, an international effort to map all cells in the human body, according to the release. The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, or CZI, is a philanthropic organization founded in 2015 by pediatrician Priscilla Chan, MD, and her spouse, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“For this project, the goal is to profile every single cell in the human body,” Tseng said in an interview. “It’s been estimated there are 37 trillion cells in the human body. You have to isolate single cells and profile the gene expression patterns. This is the right time. In just the past 2 years, technology has developed to allow us to be able to do this type of profiling.”
Mary-Elizabeth Patti, MD, co-director of the Joslin Advanced Genetics and Genomics Core, director of the hypoglycemia clinic at Joslin and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, is also serving as a principal investigator for the project.
“Adipose tissue is so critical for regulating the body’s metabolism,” Patti said in the release. “Identifying differences in function and gene regulation between cells within adipose tissue in different parts of the human body will be essential to understanding how this complex tissue functions in healthy individuals, but also how it may contribute to risk for chronic disease."
According to CZI, the Seed Networks grantees represent more than 20 countries and 200 labs, with 45% of projects featuring international collaborations. These networks will support coordination between scientists and engineers and help to generate data and tools for the first draft of the Atlas.
Tseng said it is important to understand intra-tissue communication, and that by adding adipose tissue to the map, researchers will better understand how cells “talk” to each other.
“As a result of these conversations, tissue function is affected,” Tseng said. “Understanding that at the single-cell level is crucial. We want to develop precision medicine, personalized medicine, and this type of understanding is important to move forward.”
In a presentation at the 2019 Endocrine Society Annual Meeting reported by Endocrine Today, Cori Bargmann, PhD, head of the Lulu and Anthony Wang Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior and the Torsten N. Wiesel professor at the Rockefeller University in New York and CZI’s first president of science, said one of the road blocks to establishing such a resource is the need for a large data coordination platform built on a modern framework. The initiative is partnering with the Broad Institute, EMBL-EBI and the University of California, Santa Cruz, to construct the Human Cell Atlas Data Coordination Platform, which, according to Bargmann, will allow researchers to analyze, store, browse and explore data pertaining to single cells.
CZI plans to make all the data, protocols and computational tools developed as a part of Seed Networks freely available to the research community. – by Regina Schaffer
Disclosures: Tseng reports no relevant financial disclosures.