About us


The Human Developmental Cell Atlas (HDCA) is a Swedish initiative within the Human Cell Atlas (HCA), one of the largest international scientific projects. The project aim is to create a comprehensive molecular atlas of human prenatal development, describing every cell type in detail and showing their spatial and temporal distributions in three dimensions. Each cell’s molecular signature will provide deeper insight into how variations and deviations contribute to health and disease. In addition, the atlas will allow us to identify exactly where and when disease-associated genes are active in our body and analyze the regulatory mechanisms that create organs and tissues. 

We are building the human developmental atlas primarily focusing on the first trimester, which span the most important events of embryogenesis: formation of the nervous system and peripheral organs, birth of most cell types, and the first steps of maturation of cells into their adult forms.

To accomplish this, we will use state-of-the-art technologies established at SciLifeLab, including single-cell RNA, protein and spatial techniques. The workflow of the project is illustrated below and you can read more about each technology here. The project is organized, located and managed at SciLifeLab.

Overview of the HDCA workflow