The Human Cell Atlas (HCA) community is profiling millions of human cells, a process that generates enormous amounts of data that scientists need to store, standardize and interpret.
To help coordinate this data collection and processing, the HCA established the Data Coordination Platform (DCP), a public, cloud-based platform where scientists can share, organise and interrogate single-cell data.
The platform was developed and is operated by a dedicated team of scientists, engineers and bioinformaticians from the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), the Broad Institute (Broad), the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) and the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).
The DCP Strategic Aims detail the DCP team’s long-term goals for atlas development:
Aim 1. Create a data resource that maximizes the value and use of Human Cell Atlas data across the scientific community.
Aim 2. Provide researchers access to data that will enable the Human Cell Atlas to answer fundamental questions in all aspects of biology.
Aim 3. Perform regular data releases of high value to single-cell researchers.
Aim 4. Build alignment amongst the Human Cell Atlas community around a core set of computational methods and analyses.
Aim 5. Create standards for the community to use to describe single-cell experimental designs, including assay types, data and metadata.
We encourage you to contribute your data or analysis portals and methods. Learn more on the Contribute page.
The Data Coordination Platform is continuously developed and improved in response to researchers’ needs and feedback. Navigate to the Contact page to ask questions or provide feedback.