ABOUT THE MEETING

Recent advances in single cell and spatial genomics have opened the way to systematic mapping at high resolution of tissues in health and disease. Recently launched programs and consortia share common challenges and opportunities, including the identification of appropriate clinical and assay metadata, the integration of disparate, yet complementary, molecular and image-based data, and the challenge of defining common coordinate frameworks on which to base atlases and relate data.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) jointly hosted an open working meeting to encourage the sharing of best practices, lessons learned, and cutting edge technologies and analytics across atlas-building programs. Due to public health concerns and travel restrictions related to COVID-19, the meeting was held virtually on March 30 - March 31, 2020. The goal of the meeting was to build a stronger international ecosystem for single cell analysis work by bringing together key researchers in experimental techniques, data management, and analysis to build synergy through agreeing on sharing, standards, pilot projects and cross consortia resources.

This was an open and free meeting to attend, hosted by the NIH and the HCA. Among the participating groups were members of the Human Cell Atlas, including the CZI HCA Seed Networks, the Gut Cell Atlas, the EC H2020 for the Human Cell Atlas, and the Wellcome Trust and MRC HCA consortia, and the Swedish and French Consortia for the Developmental Cell Atlas, Human BioMolecular Atlas Program, the NIH BRAIN Initiative, the Cancer Moonshot Human Tumor Atlas Network, LungMAP, the Kidney Precision Medicine Program, the Immunological Genome (ImmGen) consortium, GUDMAP, GTEx, LifeTime, the Human Protein Atlas, Allen Institute for Brain Science, Medicine by Design, NIH Intramural Program, diverse Data Coordination Centers, journal editors and many others.