What is the Human Cell Atlas (HCA)?

It is an ambitious project by global Scientists to map every single cell in the human body

Cells are the basic building blocks of any living organism. Counting cells in a human body is synonymous with counting the stars in the night sky. According to recent estimates by the researchers, there are an estimated 37.2 trillion cells in a human body— the figure only included the human cells and not all the microbes that reside in our body. The estimate was drawn based on the volume and density of cells in gallbladders, knee joints, intestines, bone marrow, and many other tissues.

The human body is basically an amalgamation of collaborative cellular activity. While we have a basic understanding of the functionality of different organs in our body, much needs to be learned about what happens at the cellular level. To better understand the inner workings of these individual cells, an international collaborative venture has been undertaken by National Institutes of Health (NIH).

It is perhaps one of the biggest & most ambitious endeavors ever since the Human Genome project — another international collaboration under the guidance of the U.S Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). They set out to sequence all 3 billion chemical base pairs in the human genome which are the complete set of DNA in the human body.

Started out in 1990 with a 15-year timeline, thanks to the rapid technological advancements, it was completed in the Spring of 2003, marking one of the biggest breakthroughs of our times in the healthcare industry.