The Human Cell Atlas (HCA) has the mission to create a comprehensive map of all human cells, as a basis for both understanding human health and diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease. Inside this initiative, the ESPACE (“Expression and Spatial analysis Pancreas Atlas Consortium Europe”) consortium is born.
Right now, I am busy collaborating with different groups of Barcelona and Berlin in a “Hackathon”. Our main goal is to integrate and harmonize different data modalities at single-cell resolution to pave the way towards a holistic atlas of the human pancreas in health and disease.
More specifically, I am in charge of the scATAC data modality, which describes the chromatin accessibility landscape of each sequenced cell. This will give us an insight on the regulatory mechanisms that drives the characterization of the different cell-types in the pancreas, like which promoters are differentially accessible in different cell states or which distant trans-regulatory element could be influencing a certain gene expression.
We are planning to have an interactive visualization tool where anyone can freely explore the data we are curating.
Hope to show you more on this very soon!
Meanwhile, you can find all the information related to ESPACE here: