A cartography of human histology is in the making

As an interesting aside the UMAP method used to create one of the images in the article is very contentious in the field. There are arguments that the dimension reduction does not show anything useful [1], but is still frequently used in the field especially by biologists and other non-bioinformatics heavy people. The output can be tuned to visualize a complex dataset in a way that feels intuitive to the user.

1. https://twitter.com/lpachter/status/1431325969411821572?t=c3...

One should point out that there were several previous large-scale initiatives to characterize human tissues and cells on a molecular level. For example, GTeX [1] provides gene expression profiles from 54 tissues. However, thanks to single-cell RNA sequencing, it is now possible to look at individual cell types.

[1] https://gtexportal.org/home/