Life sciences-focused technology company MGI Tech announced a commercial partnership with Human Cell Atlas, a global consortium working to map every cell type in the human body, to advance worldwide human cell mapping.

MGI Tech is a Chinese biotechnology company that offers a high-throughput genome-sequencing machine, genetic sequencers, and other tools and technologies that can be applied to population genomics, cell omics, spatial-temporal omics, agricultural genomics and forensic genomics. 

Human Cell Atlas (HCA) is a global consortium that aims to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells to understand human health and diagnose, monitor and treat diseases. 

Human cell mapping can help researchers better understand molecular mechanisms of communication between cells, compare healthy cells to diseased ones to facilitate the development of better drugs and aid in regenerative medicine by replacing, engineering or regenerating human cells, tissues and organs.

Researchers estimate that there are approximately 36 trillion cells in the male body, about 28 million in a female body and around 17 trillion in a child's body. 

Through the partnership, members of the HCA will have access to MGI's single cell and spatial omics technologies. MGI will also provide HCA members with support in experimental design, bioinformatics and assay execution. 

"We are proud to support HCA researchers worldwide in this important effort to uncover the intricate details of how the genes in our cells shape life," Duncan Yu, president at MGI, said in a statement. 

"Leveraging MGI's highly sensitive and specific tools with comprehensive coverage, this partnership will allow the HCA community to push the boundaries of single cell genomics and spatial omics further, with broad implications for scientific discovery and disease research."

THE LARGER TREND

As opposed to cell mapping, human genome mapping has been a project some organizations have undertaken.

According to the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute, genome mapping can provide evidence that a disease transmitted from parent to child is linked to one or more genes and gives clues as to which chromosome contains the gene and where the gene exists within that chromosome. 

To produce a genetic map, blood or tissue samples are collected from individuals whose family members have a particular disease or trait. Scientists then isolate the DNA samples from those individuals and examine them for unique patterns seen only in family members with the disease or trait. The characteristic patterns in those chemical bases are referred to as markers. 

The markers don't specifically indicate which gene is responsible for the disease or trait, but, as noted above, they can inform researchers of roughly where the gene lies on the chromosome. 

From 1990 to 2003, an international effort to generate the first sequence of the human genome took place called the Human Genome Project. In 2003, the collaboration produced a genome sequence that accounted for more than 90% of the human genome, which was as close to complete as technologies for sequencing DNA would allow at the time.