The Human Cell Atlas (HCA) Developmental and Pediatric Cell Atlas Meeting
Posted by Gary Bader, on 19 August 2021
The Human Cell Atlas (HCA) Developmental and Pediatric Cell Atlas meeting will be held August 25-27, 2021 online. Free registration up to and during the meeting is available at https://devped2021.humancellatlas.org/
This meeting will bring together diverse communities of scientists to plan how to map human development from conception to adolescence, and how to apply this knowledge to address important scientific and clinical challenges. We are particularly looking to engage developmental biologists and pediatric community members, as well as computational biologists, single-cell and imaging genomics experts, clinicians and ethicists who are interested in forging new collaborations to support this effort.
We have an amazing presenter line up, including: Hans Clevers, Kat Hadjantonakis, Muzz Haniffa, Aviv Regev, Sarah Teichmann, Sten Linnarsson, Deanne Taylor, Amos Tanay, and Barbara Treutlein. The meeting also will feature lightning talks, poster sessions and an ethics panel led by Bartha Knoppers and Jonah Cool, with panelists Helen Firth, Dimitri Patrinos, Vasiliki Rahimzadeh and Deanne Taylor.
To help participants connect around key research areas, a large part of the meeting will involve scientific discussion at breakout sessions covering the following topics:
- Regulatory mechanisms in development (led by James Briscoe and Jesse Gillis)
- Single cell genetics to highlight genes, pathways, cell types and tissues (led by Gray Camp and Xiao Chen)
- Understanding cellular decision-making during development (led by Anne Grapin-Botton and Cantas Alev)
- Imaging and spatial omics technologies and applications (led by Ali Erturk and Hiroki Ueda)
- Lineage tracing, recording, clonal evolution, tagging and its applications (led by Samantha Morris and Nozomu Yachie)
- Abnormal development in humans (led by Heather Etchevers and Stéphane Zaffran)
- Clinical genetics – use of development and pediatric single-cell atlas data to identify disease causing variants in patients (led by Sarah Henrickson and Helen Firth)
- Regenerative medicine (led by Guoji Guo and Jason Rock)
- Developmental origins of health outcomes over a lifespan/Challenges of studying an organ from development to aging at the single cell level (led by Kricket Seidman and Arnold Kriegstein)
- The ethics of working with human developmental and pediatric samples (led by Bartha Knoppers and Jonah Cool)
To learn more about the Pediatric and Development Cell Atlas projects, please read The Pediatric Cell Atlas: defining the growth phase of human development at single-cell resolution (Dev Cell. 2019) and Human Developmental Cell Atlas: milestones achieved and the roadmap ahead (in press, 2021)
Hope you will be able to join the discussion!
This meeting is generously supported by University of Toronto’s Medicine by Design program, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Cincinnati Children’s hospital, the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Genome Canada, the Development journal, and the McLaughlin Centre at the University of Toronto. HCA gratefully acknowledges the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Klarman Family Foundation for additional organizational support.