Biotin-Tagging Based Map of the Human Cell Developed

Researchers from Sinai Health have created ‘The Human Cell Map,’ which provides an ultra-detailed look at the organization of a living human cell. The new study—published today in Nature—was conducted by a team at the University of Toronto.

"The Human Cell Map was able to predict the localization of 4,000 proteins across all compartments in living human cells," said lead researcher Christopher Go. "We sampled all the major organelles of the human cell and used innovative analysis to create the highest resolution map to date, with high accuracy in predicting novel localizations for many unmapped proteins."

In the new research, they purified the proteins that are ‘tagged’ by organelle markers and identified each of them by mass spectrometry. The team then used computational tools to reconstruct the human cell. "Through our research, we have shown that we can precisely localize thousands of proteins at a time with relatively little effort," said co-first author James Knight. "Previous methods for localizing a protein required each protein to be investigated individually, or required a limited focus."

Given the expansive nature of the Human Cell Map, the team also created an analysis portal to allow researchers around the world to delve deeper into the data. Users can scan each of the 192 markers in detail and compare their own data on protein localization to predictions made in the Human Cell Map. Knight said while this work provides a greater understanding of the organization within the human cell, it also can be leveraged to better understand what happens during disease.