A reference atlas is only as useful as the coordinate system it’s built on. For the human body — with its 37 trillion cells, dozens of organs, and enormous variation across individuals — building that coordinate system from scratch is one of the most ambitious undertakings in modern biology.
This paper describes HuBMAP’s 3D Human Reference Atlas (HRA) v2.0: what it contains, how it was built, and how researchers can use it to map their own data.
The Human BioMolecular Atlas Program set out to do something audacious: map the healthy human body at single-cell resolution, across all major organs, from diverse populations, and make everything freely available to the research community.
The first phase was about building the foundation — ontologies, standardized protocols, analytical pipelines, and the infrastructure needed to support a project at this scale. That work is done. The program has now entered its production phase.
