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.
